Is This a Police State?

A border patrol agent aims a munition launcher at a crowd in Minneapolis after a federal officer shot and killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti on Saturday. Ben Hovland/Minnesota Public Radio via AP

Toward the end of 2024, several weeks before Donald Trump would regain power, I wrote an article headlined, “Donald Trump Will Need a Police State to Implement His Agenda.” I observed, “Trump has many plans for his return engagement at the White House. Several will require police-state tactics”—foremost his vow to round up and deport 11 million or so undocumented immigrants. Peering into the future, I wrote:

Such a program would require deploying a paramilitary force—or even the National Guard or the military—to locate migrants, apprehend them, and guard them in a network of prisons and detention camps. (Executives at private prison, security, and surveillance software companies are already salivating.) This system would depend on Trump ramping up monitoring of workplaces and neighborhoods, and on anonymous tip lines susceptible to abuse and false leads. (Have a problem with a neighbor? Report ’em.) Perhaps the forces rounding up migrants will be afforded special powers to evade civil liberties protections. As in East Germany during the Cold War, an atmosphere of terror and intimidation will pervade.

I bring this up to make two points. First, what we are seeing in Minneapolis with the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti was entirely foreseeable. I’m no Nostradamus, and it was obvious to me this horror was coming. (By the way, Nostradamus was no Nostradamus.) No one should be surprised that Trump, Stephen Miller, JD Vance, Kristi Noem, Gregory Bovino, and others have unleashed a violent and unlawful wave of terror upon the nation. Any Trump supporter aghast at this has no excuse. (I’m looking at you, Joe Rogan.) Trump had a long history of encouraging and excusing violence. He praised authoritarians who resort to violence. He plainly spelled out his intention to remove over 10 million people. Such a profound disruption of American life could not be achieved without force and cruelty.

Second, even though I feared Trump would turn to police-state tactics, I and others who expected some of this did not fully envision the lawlessness, savagery, and viciousness that now infuses Trump’s regime. But we should have known. Barbarity on the ground requires malice in the highest offices of the land. Troops that are sadistic and ruthless follow the lead of those directing them.

It’s a sign of the Trump crew’s depravity that we now are not shocked that following the extrajudicial execution of Pretti, an ICU nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital, the men and women in charge of our government immediately branded him a “terrorist” and falsely claimed he had tried to kill ICE and CBP agents. Stephen Miller, the Minister of Hate, was one of the first out of the gate with this deplorable gaslighting. In response to a tweet from Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who urged Trump and his henchmen to watch the “horrific video” of the lethal attack on Pretti, Miller posted on X: “A domestic terrorist tried to assassinate federal law enforcement and this is your response.”

There was no evidence of any of that. In fact, multiple videos that became publicly available right after the killing clearly demonstrated that Pretti had not attempted to “assassinate” the agents. He was trying to help a woman being assaulted by them and in doing so became a target of their wrath. Without an ounce of humanity, humility, or sympathy, other Trumpers joined in, as they did with the murder of Good, to demonize the victim of a summary execution.

On CNN, the Border Patrol’s Bovino huffed, “The victims are the Border Patrol agent. The suspect put himself in that situation.” On ABC News’ This Week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent justified the killing by saying that Pretti had been armed. When host Jon Karl pointed out Pretti had not brandished the gun, Bessent smugly and disingenuously replied, “I've been to a protest—guess what? I didn't bring a gun. I brought a billboard.” So now the Trump administration is in favor of killing people who carry weapons to protests?

Kash Patel added to this dissembling chorus. “You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want,” he said. “It's that simple. You don't have a right to break the law and incite violence." Actually, you can. In many places, the law—thanks to conservatives like Patel—allows people to bring a gun to a rally or anywhere else. (This month, the Supreme Court heard a challenge to a law in Hawaii banning gun owners from bringing their weapons onto private property open to the public without approval from the property owner. The Trump administration filed a brief supporting the challenge.)

Patel’s claim that Pretti had incited violence was slanderous. In a menacing manner, he added, “You do not get to attack law enforcement officials in this country without any repercussions…We not messing around.” Here was the FBI director echoing the defamation of Pretti, who had not assaulted the officers, and essentially saying federal agents have the right to shoot you dead if you get in the way. In law enforcement agencies across the land, that is not justification for the use of lethal force. But the message is obvious: Oppose us and we will kill you—and then lie about you. For Trump’s brownshirts, there is no accountability.

What’s going on is no mystery. A standard play of authoritarian and fascist governments is to brand critics and opponents “terrorists.” Vladimir Putin does this. He recently labeled the anti-corruption organization founded by Alexei Navalny a “terrorist” outfit. And terrorists obviously are legitimate targets of extreme measures. Anyone who cooperates with Navalny’s group can now be imprisoned for life.

All this follows Trump’s routine use of hate-fueled divisive rhetoric. He regularly denigrates his political opponents as “the enemy within” and asserts that Democrats, liberals, and the media are in league with “lunatic radicals,” communists, and antifa to destroy the United States. For years, he has been vilifying his foes and detractors as direct threats to the nation, frequently saying they pose more of a risk to the country than Russia or China. It is a small step from that to decrying Pretti and other protesters as “terrorists.” Once you do, it’s open season on these Americans.

As part of this phony and dangerous demagogic narrative, Vance and other Trump lieutenants are suggesting a nefarious force is behind the anti-ICE protests. “The level of engineered chaos is unique to Minneapolis,” the vice president posted on X. “It’s the direct consequence of far left agitators, working with local authorities.” And Bessent exclaimed, “There are a lot of paid agitators who are ginning things up.”

This is the sort of accusation J. Edgar Hoover and others hurled in the 1960s: The antiwar movement was funded and controlled by communists; the civil rights movement was funded and controlled by communists. President Ronald Reagan said the same about the nuclear freeze movement in the 1980s. Those who challenge the administration cannot be patriotic Americans. They must be that enemy within— subversives and terrorists. They deserve no quarter and no protection of the law. They must be crushed. They must be eradicated.

That is the police-state mentality. I suppose you can’t run a police state without it. If you deploy a paramilitary force to terrorize the public—which certainly was the goal of flooding ICE and CBP agents into the Twin Cities—you must support your thugs and back up the narrative that the people they brutalize and perhaps kill had it coming. You can’t enforce rules and regs for this force. That will reveal contradictions and undermine your Manichean tale of good (us) and evil (them). This is about power and decidedly not about the rule of law. The aim is to obliterate the rule of law.

So are we now in a police state? Not quite. As thousands of kind-hearted and brave Minnesotans have shown us, the right to protest and challenge Trump’s reign of violence remains, even if his masked goons have made it perilous to do so. Police states don’t allow such demonstrations. But Trump, Miller, and the rest are attempting to smother opposition to the point they’re justifying and whitewashing the brazen murders of American citizens. They are hellbent on establishing an environment of fear and terror. They don’t mind a Kent State every week. The chaos, the disorder, the violence—these are their tools and their ends.

They have not yet won. They are ferociously employing the strategies and tactics of a police state. Most Americans, though, oppose this. Even a handful of Republicans have expressed concern or anger about the killing of Pretti. The question is, what will the majority do to stop Trump and his gangsters? Can it yield a resistance fierce enough—in the courts, at polling places, on the streets, online, and elsewhere—to beat back Trump’s hostile takeover of the nation?

Trump has transformed the national political discourse from skirmishes over his assorted harebrained ideas and extreme actions (Venezuela, Greenland, vengeful criminal prosecutions, mass deportations, the destruction of the public health establishment, his war on universities, tax cuts for the rich, and so on) into a debate over the fundamental nature of the United States. Will it become a full-fledged authoritarian-led police state? That’s the fight at hand. Trump and his miscreants are eager for it. They may attain their fascistic fantasy—unless enough Americans say no.

It’s easy to lose sight of the victims of Trump’s murder spree. So I’m going to end with one of the many heart-warming remembrances of Pretti that appeared on social media after his killing.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

The day that Alex Pretti was shot dead by federal agents, the White House held a special event: a private screening of Melania, the new Amazon documentary about a woman married to a felon who was held liable in a civil trial for sexual assault. Jeff Bezos’ company paid $40 million for this film—an amount far above the standard industry payment. This was tribute (or a bribe) from Lord Amazon to the Emperor. The guest list for the screening included Apple CEO Tim Cook, New York Stock Exchange CEO Lynn Martin, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, and, naturally, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.

By showing up at events like this, Cook, Jassy, and the rest are normalizing and bolstering a wannabe autocrat presiding over a secret police force killing Americans. The blood of Renée Good and Alex Pretti is on the hands of those who enable Trump. Meanwhile, let’s check in on Melania’s meme coin.

Nuremberg. It’s far too appropriate a time to watch a movie about the Nazi war-crime trials. Eighty years later, we’re still trying to figure out what turns humans into monsters and an entire society into a genocidal culture of hate and evil. As the movie notes, the trials—the first time nations had assembled to prosecute former government officials for plotting and waging aggressive war and for crimes against humanity—set an important precedent for the international order. That was the intention of Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon), who led the prosecution. In the film, he is a noble warrior for justice who must use his wiles to persuade the Truman administration and the Brits, Soviets, and French to mount these proceedings. Half of the movie is his heroic tale of striving to establish a legal framework for Never Again.

The emotional guts of the movie is the lesser-known story of Douglas Kelley, an Army psychiatrist assigned to examine the personalities and assess the mental statuses of the captured Nazi officials set to go on trial, most notably Hermann Goring, the Reichsmarschall and the most senior of Hitler’s henchmen to be captured. This was the challenge for director and scriptwriter James Vanderbilt: How to depict Goring not merely as a one-dimensional diabolical evildoer but a person who’s worth getting to know—yet who deserves no sympathy. Russell Crowe took on the task of portraying Hitler’s top aide as both an engaging and repulsive man. And Rami Malek as Kelley is almost a stand-in for Vanderbilt, as he attempts to get close to Goring without falling for his charm and intelligence. Goring claims he did not know about the camps and was only a military man honorably serving his government. And Kelley develops a complex and fraught bond with Goring, as he tries to understand the German and the other Nazi prisoners—to gather material for a book that Kelley assumes will earn him fame and fortune.

The film is mostly accurate, though full of the usual dramatic license. As could be expected, at a key point, the Jackson and Kelley narratives intersect to benefit the forces of good and righteousness. But what fascinates the most is Goring. How does the son of a middling diplomat and the godson of a wealthy Jewish physician and businessman become such a fanatic and a critical part of one of history’s largest mass-murder machines? (The godson of a Jew is an interesting backstory.) And how does he—and his fellow Nazi prisoners—process what the Reich wrought?

Nuremberg delivers no answers to the questions we are compelled to ponder about the Holocaust, the men responsible for it, and the descent of an entire nation into murderous authoritarianism. How does evil triumph? But Vanderbilt raises all this without being heavy-handed. These are topics that deserve constant attention even if we cannot resolve them. At Nuremberg, such questions were applied to the most enormous of sins. But they’re also relevant for what we see at home and abroad these days. The lust for power, the demonization of marginalized communities, the weaponization of hate and bigotry, the widespread use of propaganda, the tribalization and cultification of politics, the love of violence—who embraces this? Who falls prey to it? Nuremberg reminds us we can never stop asking.

“The Separation: Inside the Unraveling US-Ukraine Partnership,” Adam Entous, the New York Times. It took me a while to get to the masterful and massive report written by New York Times journalist Adam Entous on the Trump administration’s haphazard and Keystone Kops-like handling of the negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. As you know, Trump repeatedly and absurdly promised during the 2024 campaign that he could within 24 hours forge a peace deal to stop the brutal war that Vladimir Putin, now an indicted war criminal, launched with a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. That was complete bullshit. And imagine saying you could stop such tremendous bloodshed but will only reveal your plan if you win an election. This was a clear sign that Trump was clueless about the conflict.

In this article, Entous details what happened once Trump returned to office. You will not be surprised to learn that his Ukrainian policy was hampered by chaos and erraticism—including Trump’s own zigzagging. There was no coherent policymaking within the national security agencies. At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a skeptic of US support for Kyiv, held up arms deliveries to Ukrainian forces, contravening administration policy. Keith Kellogg, a former Army general who had served as national security adviser for Vice President Mike Pence, was appointed by Trump to be his special envoy for Ukraine and Russia—and then cut out of key deliberations. Within the administration there were “bitterly warring camps.”

Trump himself was bouncing about like a ping pong ball. He long had an odd fondness and affection for Putin, and he harbored all sorts of suspicions about Ukraine, including believing a wackadoodle conspiracy theory that somehow Ukraine, not Russia, had intervened in the 2016 election. (This idea was promoted by a Russian disinformation campaign.) So although the US government was still providing loads of much-needed weapons and critical intelligence to Ukrainian forces, as they pounded the Russians, Trump’s heart was never in it. When Kellogg referred to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “embattled” and “courageous,” Trump was irate. He subsequently referred to Kellogg as “an idiot.”

Ukrainian policy quickly became a mess. To further discombobulate it, Trump anointed Steve Witkoff, the New York developer and Trump crony serving as Middle Eastern envoy, to take the lead in hammering out a deal. Witkoff was soon joined by Jared Kushner, and they began negotiating with Kirill Dmitriev, the chief of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, who had been sanctioned by several countries. One wonders what potential self-serving business deals entered these discussions.

Putin, through Witkoff, played Trump, speaking of his “great respect” for the American president, and Trump believed his cozy relationship with Vlad would quickly lead to a peace deal. As Entous notes, “Witkoff, who often insisted on meeting Putin alone, with no aides or US government translator, “sometimes seemed to lack an understanding of Ukraine’s geography and its strategic implications.” Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance seemed to be doing much to undercut administration support for Ukraine.

It’s been a clown show. Clearly, Trump doesn’t care about Ukraine or about protecting an albeit imperfect democratic nation from the vicious aggression of a tyrannical autocrat whom he once invited to be his “new best friend.” He just wants to the war to be done, so he can partner up with Putin and stride the globe together as strongmen. After reading this 14,000-word piece, I did a word-search for “democracy.” Not once did it appear. That’s as telling as all the marvelous fly-on-the-wall reporting Entous delivers.

Yes, at Davos, Zelenskyy did compare the negotiations to end the war to Groundhog Day: