A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.
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.” In this piece, 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.
Barbarity on the ground requires malice in the highest offices of the land.
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. (Days later, Miller engaged in a partial pullback, noting that the CBP team that killed Pretti “may not” have been following protocol. But he did not retract his foul description of Pretti or apologize for defaming him.)
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?
The message is obvious: Oppose us and we will kill you—and then lie about you. For Trump’s brownshirts, there is no accountability.
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 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 was going on was 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.
Those who challenge the administration cannot be patriotic Americans. They must be that enemy within— subversives and terrorists.
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.
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?
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 some 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.
