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What MAGA Sees in the Minnesota Mirror

By David French, NY Times

Excerpts:

It’s important to know exactly what is happening in our country. President Trump suffered a setback in Minneapolis … and it’s creating a parallel MAGA reality that is laying the foundation for a further escalation of state violence.

Here’s how the process works.

First, federal officers (mainly from ICE and the Border Patrol) engage in extraordinarily aggressive and lawless conduct, including initiating physical contact with protesters or members of the public.

And they’re not limiting their aggression to criminal illegal immigrants, the “worst of the worst.” They’re detaining people who have been granted lawful status, they’ve swept up citizens in the dragnet and they’re claiming the authority to enter people’s homes without judicial warrants granting them a right to search.

Second, when a confrontation occurs, the administration and its allies in Congress immediately release statements blaming the victims, often using the strongest possible language — calling them “domestic terrorists” or “seditionists.”

None of those statements are remotely supported by the available evidence.

The administration makes these statements before there’s any investigation and sometimes before they’ve even had an opportunity to review all the publicly available evidence, including cellphone videos. If the encounter isn’t fatal, they’ll often file criminal charges and put out news releases trumpeting their prosecution.

You get the feeling that if they could charge the dead with crimes, they’d do so, with glee.

Third, when members of the media try to carefully report the facts and call into question the administration’s account, then that’s a fresh outrage. To MAGA, contrary media accounts are yet another example of the activist legacy media lying and spinning.

Finally, …. Adverse legal rulings anger MAGA even more — now the judges are also engaged in a form of “legal insurrection” or nullification of federal law.

Protests make MAGA mad. Journalism makes MAGA mad. Accountability makes MAGA mad. And the anger keeps building until a single sentence starts to spread across the length and breadth of Trump’s base: “Invokethe Insurrection Act.”

Viewed through one prism, this pattern is a form of political suicide. As the polling demonstrates, many Americans who thought they were voting for better border controls and tougher immigration restrictions are unhappy with Trump’s aggression.

Voters don’t like the sight of masked officers dragging people out of homes and stores and cars. They don’t like the hype videos on social media in which ICE and the Border Patrol cosplay as low-rent versions of SEAL Team 6.

They don’t like it when the administration lies and slanders the very people that it hurts and kills, and they get especially angry when cellphone video immediately debunks the administration’s spin.

And to the extent that they pay attention to court proceedings, they definitely don’t like it when the administration is caught lying and defies court orders.

At each and every step along the way, the administration is squandering whatever good will it had and increasing the chances of a blue wave in the midterms.

The problem, however, is that the administration is playing a different game. It’s not trying to win hearts and minds, but rather impose its will.

When undocumented immigrants commit a violent crime, the news blankets right-wing media. We know from the 2024 election that the right will traffic in the wildest lies about immigrant communities, including indulging the fantasy that Haitian immigrants were eating household pets in Springfield, Ohio. Words like “invasion” are omnipresent in right-wing media.

Against that backdrop, from MAGA’s viewpoint, the rest of the country’s response to the deaths of Good and Pretti looks a lot like the North’s response to the execution of John Brown. Good and Pretti didn’t have blood on their hands like Brown, but in the eyes of the MAGA right, they’re dangerous criminals who are responsible for their own deaths.
They are guilty of impeding officers. They are guilty of resisting arrest. Pretti is guilty of bringing a gun to a protest (an odd thing for the right to object to, given its own penchant for armed protest). They are guilty of protecting vicious and violent criminal immigrants.

The right’s echo chamber is so powerful and so hermetically sealed that even serious conservatives can fall for the administration’s disinformation.

In fact, the Trump administration lies with such regularity and brazenness that one should presume that it’s being dishonest until we can see with our own eyes the evidence that supports its account.

As of this writing, Miller’s post accusing Pretti of being an assassin is still up. Vance’s retweet of Miller’s post is still up. On Tuesday, a homeland security spokesman pointedly refused to back away from calling Pretti a domestic terrorist during an interview with Dana Perino on Fox News.

It was only this past Sunday that Miller claimed that Democrats, “after losing an election, launched an armed resistance to stop the federal government from reversing the invasion.”

And then, as if on cue, Miller attacked the judiciary again just as I was finalizing this newsletter. A federal court in Minneapolis issued an order blocking the administration from arresting or detaining refugees who are legally in the United States, which prompted Miller to post on X, “The judicial sabotage of democracy is unending.”

Do not mistake crisis management for real reform, and don’t believe for a second that MAGA’s fury is easing. It is not chastened by footage showing that Pretti was pepper-sprayed without justification, never reached for his weapon and was riddled with bullets after he was disarmed.

Nor is it chastened by footage showing that the officer who killed Renee Good was already out of harm’s way when he fired the first shot, or by footage showing that he created much of the danger by unwisely walking directly in front of a running car in a chaotic and confused situation. Nor is it chastened by the sound of someone close enough to be heard calling Good a “fucking bitch” right after she was shot and killed in front of her horrified partner.

And if you think MAGA believes that its fury and rage will cripple its ongoing bid for ever-greater power, think of the lesson it took after Jan. 6: Trump could trigger what amounted to an attempted coup and still return to the Oval Office.

So it doesn’t believe the polls. It doesn’t believe the media. It doesn’t believe the courts. In Trump it still trusts, and it’ll remain under his spell when someone else dies and the whole cycle starts over again.