The killings in Minneapolis of Renee Good and Alex Pretti have been compared to the murder of George Floyd, because they all happened within a few miles of one another, and because of the outrage they inspired. There’s an important difference, though: In 2020 the United States was in turmoil, but it was still a state of law. Floyd’s death was followed by investigation, trial, and verdict—by justice. The Minneapolis Police Department was held accountable and ultimately made to reform.
No one should expect justice for Good and Pretti. Today, nothing stands in the way of the brutal tactics of ICE and the Border Patrol. While President Trump seems to be trying to defuse the mayhem he’s caused by reassigning a top commander, he is not withdrawing the federal agents from the state or allowing local authorities to investigate, let alone prosecute, them for their actions.
Authoritarianism doesn’t disappear with the news cycle. The administration’s automatic lies about the killings and slander of the victims are less a cover-up of facts than a display of utter contempt for them. Trump, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, FBI Director Kash Patel, and other top officials seem to invite incredulity as a way to flex their power: We say black is white. Agree or you’re a criminal. When Stephen Miller recently claimed that geopolitics is ruled by the “iron laws” of “strength” and “force,” he was expressing the administration’s approach to domestic governance as well. Those words are iron laws on American streets.
The prelude to the violence of January 7 and 24 came not in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, but in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021. Trump and his supporters were prevented from stealing an election and overthrowing the Constitution by democratic institutions—Congress, the courts, the police, the media, and public opinion. But the insurrection never ended. By the time Trump returned to power and pardoned the insurrectionists, almost half of the country believed that January 6 was a patriotic demonstration, a false-flag operation, or just no big deal. Throughout 2025, institutions that once restrained the presidency weakened or fell away one by one, until earlier this month Trump told The New York Times that the only limit to his power is his own mind. That same day, January 7, authoritarianism had its predictable consequence in freezing Minneapolis with the execution of Renee Good.
[Nick Miroff: Greg Bovino loses his job]
If rogue federal agents can shoot American citizens dead with total impunity, then it doesn’t matter whether state and local authorities, the courts, the media, the political opposition, and a mobilized public object. “ICE > MN,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on social media—an assertion of raw force, not constitutional authority. When Trump and his loyalists call protesters terrorists and warn that disobeying orders will get you killed, they strip away any illusion that the federal government respects the lives, let alone the rights, of those who oppose it—potentially half the population or more.
A lawless regime is an illegitimate one. If the country seems to have reached a breaking point in Minneapolis, this is why. And yet Minneapolis also offers a compelling answer to the question that democracy-loving Americans have asked for the past year: What can I do?
No historical precedent exists for where we are. Individuals and groups have often accused the U.S. government of denying their rights, and some of those accusations were irrefutable—as in the century between Appomattox and Selma, when the rights of Black Americans were denied throughout the South with the connivance of Washington. Some, though, were shams. In 1861, the Confederacy declared the government in Washington illegitimate and fired the first shots of the Civil War, not because any rights had been taken away from southern states—not even the right to hold human beings in bondage—but because they hated and feared Abraham Lincoln and his Republican Party. After the 2020 election, MAGA tried to claim that the election had been stolen and a Biden presidency would be illegitimate; truth and the law prevailed.
The federal government has never declared itself immune to the law and the Constitution while explicitly denying protection to peaceful opponents, until now. Many Americans who thought they were living under the rule of law feel paralyzed. The vague exhortation to “do something while you still can” creates a sense of urgency but doesn’t provide a plan. Rather than inspiring action, the question of what to do more likely leaves you feeling depressed and alone. Not even the prospect of waiting out the year until the midterms provides much reassurance. Trump has made it clear that he will try to undermine any election that might cost him some of his power.
Without a constructive answer, the danger is that Americans who find themselves without legal remedies will turn to illegal and violent ones. That would be a catastrophic mistake, both strategically and morally.
So far, action has come in the form of either legal challenge or protest, including speeches and writings by politicians and public figures, and the occasional nationwide demonstrations known as “No Kings,” which draw on patriotic imagery and the historic American aversion to tyranny. The key to the popularity of No Kings lies in its unifying name. The focus is not a single issue, such as abortion, immigration, Ukraine, or Gaza, but a broad stance against autocracy and for democracy. Its demonstrations are orderly, peaceful, good-tempered, and irreverent, featuring countless American flags. No Kings hasn’t been hijacked by leftist groups with more extreme agendas, spouting strident anti-American language that’s bound to repel ordinary people. But No Kings has been inconspicuous since October. It will have to transform itself into something much more potent than a once-a-quarter day of demonstration.
[George Packer: Why the ‘No Kings’ protest moved me]
In Minneapolis, as the scale and intensity of oppression increased, the answer to “What can I do?” evolved from protest to something riskier and more demanding: nonviolent resistance. As my colleague Robert Worth has reported, networks of Minneapolitans that had formed after Floyd’s murder to protect their neighborhoods from both out-of-control police and rioters have been revived in the past few months to protect their immigrant neighbors from the invasion of federal agents. Residents undergo training in nonviolent resistance, which demands courage, wisdom, and restraint; they bring food to those hiding at home, escort children to school, and stand watch outside; they blow whistles and send out alerts on encrypted chats to signal the presence of ICE vehicles, and follow them; they try to de-escalate confrontations (sometimes with the opposite result), provide medical aid to the injured, and shame masked agents in military gear who seem poorly trained and undisciplined compared with the civilians.
Given the level of rage on the streets, the conduct of these local networks has been remarkable. One older suburban woman—nothing like the “lunatics,” “domestic terrorists,” or “assassins” Trump and his advisers see in Minneapolis—told Worth that she doesn’t even consider her involvement political. Her preferred term for what she’s doing is humanist. It could be a byword for the whole opposition to a cruel and predatory regime.
Minneapolis is setting an example for the rest of the country: a nameless, leaderless, self-organized movement. Self-organization is a term I heard from almost everyone I met in Ukraine shortly after the Russian invasion. It’s an inherently hard form of activism, requiring high levels of motivation and trust. These obviously exist in the neighborhoods of South Minneapolis, where civic spirit and personal connections run deep. But replicating them on a wider scale—essentially, creating a mass movement for basic decency—raises obvious problems. That movement’s energy might depend on the arrival of conspicuous federal oppression in other blue cities and states (which Trump has promised). It would have to remain decentralized and maintain its local integrity while creating a capacity for nationwide coordination. It could fall apart for lack of discipline, coherence, trust, and leadership—or, conversely, because of leadership that devolves into factionalism. The civil-rights movement confronted all of these problems, and overcame them.
No Kings or another group could consider organizing and training people in other parts of the country to join the kind of civic action on display in Minneapolis—to move from protest to nonviolent resistance. Beyond neighbor-to-neighbor support in a moment of crisis lies a wide range of means to withhold cooperation from an illegitimate government. The late theorist Gene Sharp laid them out, along with ideas for strategic planning, in books such as From Dictatorship to Democracy and Waging Nonviolent Struggle. Sharp’s work has been used as an essential guide for democracy activists under dictatorial regimes in countries such as Serbia, Burma, and Iran. Americans should pick up these books and absorb their lessons.
Sharp analyzed various “methods of noncooperation”—political, economic, and social—that stop short of more aggressive disruptions. They include boycotts and strikes (such as the widely observed general strike in Minneapolis last Friday); refusal to participate in administration-supported organizations and events; “quasi-legal evasions and delays” and “reluctant and slow compliance” with government edicts; and finally, nonviolent civil disobedience. Anti-ICE actions that try to thwart the brutal and indiscriminate enforcement of immigration laws can become a form of civil disobedience.
[Adam Serwer: Minnesota proved MAGA wrong]
Nonviolent struggle carries serious risks. It can lead to social ostracism, legal harassment, state intimidation, prison, injury, and, as we’ve seen in Minneapolis, death. One sign of the authoritarian depth to which the U.S. has sunk under Trump is that none of these risks is hard to imagine. Examples accumulate every day. A movement of resistance against an illegitimate regime has a chance of succeeding only if it remains strictly nonviolent and avoids the familiar trap of sectarianism. It has to be democratic, patriotic, and animated by a sense of basic decency that can attract ordinary people—your TV-watching mother, your apathetic teen, your child’s teacher, the retiree next door, the local grocer.
I keep asking myself whether it’s wise to even consider these things. I don’t want to sound alarmist, or delusional, or needlessly provocative. For an American who grew up in the postwar order with its apparently permanent rules, in a democracy with obvious flaws that nonetheless seemed on a course of gradual, inevitable progress, I find it extremely hard to assess the peril. I’m tempted to believe that the country will somehow return to normal, because I want it to be normal. We’ve never been here before, and either the nervous system overreacts or the imagination fails. After Minneapolis, I fear the latter more. Trump is taking the country on a path to tyranny. The first obligation for each of us is to see it and name it. The next is to figure out what to do about it.
