Trump Once Again Failed the Decency Test
His response to the killing in Minnesota was shocking, if not surprising.
In late November, Andrew Sullivan published a Substack post that has really stuck with me. Titled “The Question of Decency,” Sullivan was writing in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s dehumanizing “Quiet, piggy” comment to a female reporter on Air Force One.
Sullivan was lamenting the extent to which American discourse has degraded, the way that cruelty and spite have become regular features of politics. He was also commenting on the extent to which the president of the United States himself is leading this new era of indecency.
I was reminded of Sullivan’s article yesterday watching the news unfold of a U.S. citizen being shot dead by a federal agent in Minneapolis. The Trump administration’s reaction to the killing ranks as one of the most indecent displays of political cynicism and outright cruelty in recent memory.
In verified videos of the event, Renee Nicole Good, who appeared to have parked her car parallel across a street to protest an ICE immigration crackdown in the area, is approached by several ICE agents who demand she get out of the vehicle. Rather than complying, she attempts to drive away. Briefly, she drives in the direction of one officer, who draws his gun and opens fire three times.
The most plausible interpretation of the footage seems not to be that Good was attempting to run over the officer, but that she was attempting to flee. This is suggested by the wheels of the car, which appear to be executing a rightward turn. It was surely a scary situation for the officer. But when he shoots Good for the second and third time, she is already driving past him. He seems to be shooting into the driver’s window from the side. Shooting her dead, in other words, was likely not required for self-defense.
To me, this is the common-sense interpretation of the footage. Still, I am not a politician. A politician’s role is to urge caution, to not inflame tensions. To wait until the facts are known—all the facts, not the facts as they emerge chaotically from the internet. And let’s remember that a politician has a duty towards law enforcement, who really do have a very difficult job to do, especially in a free country where obstructive protests are common. But they also have a duty to the public to assure them that law enforcement is held to the highest standards of public safety; that any allegation or evidence of excessive force will be taken seriously. That’s the only way to build trust.
In many other countries, the president would have issued a statement of condolence to the family of the dead woman. He would have urged calm, and warned people not to jump to conclusions. He would have assured the American people that the incident was under investigation, and that—polarizing as the immigration raids are, high as temperatures are running—the most important thing is for people to mourn the loss of human life. He would have had his own views on the incident, but he would not have expressed those views in the degraded, finger-pointing tenor of an anonymous Twitter troll.
Trump’s response, by contrast, was to vilify the victim. He accused her of willfully attempting to mow down an officer. He asserted, without a shred of evidence, that an onlooker was a paid agitator. And—worst of all—he said nothing that even came close to the sort of human response to tragedy that we would expect of minimally decent human beings.
I am not American. From the outside, it’s hard to comprehend the level of dysfunction that seems to have infected American society at the highest level, in which the head of state’s reaction to a loss of life is to sow division rather than heal it. It’s equally hard to overstate how unique this is, at least among Western liberal democracies. I can’t imagine many other heads of state reacting as Trump did—and as his entire administration seemed to do, with similarly inflammatory comments from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and others describing Good as a terrorist. This isn’t about Trump being right-wing, or even a populist. There are plenty of other right-wing populists who would never have reacted in this way to a member of the public being shot dead by law enforcement.
This is about Trump’s clear failings as a human being. Before he came onto the political scene in 2015, public figures (mostly) held themselves to certain standards of decency. They played politics, yes, but they also tried to bring the nation together in times of tragedy. And they often extended this courtesy to situations where the stakes were far smaller, such as when their supporters got just a little too mean and vindictive and needed to be reined in.
During the first Trump presidency, it became customary, in a kind of “gotcha” moment, for progressives to wheel out a particular clip of John McCain defending his opponent, Barack Obama, during a rally ahead of the 2008 election. Sometimes this gesture felt trite. Not today. Today, I think it serves as a timely reminder of just how far American politics has fallen from decency.
Luke Hallam is senior editor at Persuasion.
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She ran over the officer's foot and nearly ran him over. That was clear. Either she made a fatal mistake, or it was attempted murder of the officer. However, her biggest mistake was listening to the unhinged left normalizing the actions to impede law enforcement from enforcing immigration laws. Placing her vehicle in the middle of the road to block ICE officers was in fact an act that justified her arrest and criminal prosecution.
The actual people responsible for her death are all the people justifying the leftist violence against ICE.
There can be no doubt in any rational American mind hat one of the prime motivations behind Trump’s (through the puppy killer) deployment of thousands of masked and armed ICE agents into primarily blue cities was to create exactly the kind of tensions it has, with the predicable results.
Trump is dying for a reason to use the Insurrection Act both as a demonstration of his dictatorial powers and as a way to feed red meat to his supporters and to distract them from the damage his economic policies are doing, not to mention the Epstein files. And putting these masked thugs, most of whose training, backgrounds, legal records, and political leadings are entirely unknown into the streets, with essentially carte blanche to do whatever they want is an open invitation to just the kind of trouble we’ve been seeing.
I won’t even comment on the utter absurdity of a Trumpchick wearing a cowboy hat several sizes too big describing an incident about which she could have had no complete, factual knowledge at the time, only excuses from the field by some agent who was either dead to any concept of conscience or very worried about possible consequences.
This will happen again and again until this administration is sent packing into the dustbin of history, and that cannot happen soon enough.
THIS MUST PROVE TO BE A DEATH TOO FAR.
This woman’s blood is not only on the hands of the agent who killed her, but also the puppy killer herself, her demented boss, the six conservatives justices on the Supreme Court for their inexcusable sloth and apparent inability to understand Trump’s clear motives, and the political party that has chosen loyalty over integrity, sycophancy over competency, and Trump over the Constitution.