The events in Minneapolis, especially the horrifying killing of two Americans, reconfirmed one awful thing and taught us two encouraging things.
What was reconfirmed was the sheer malevolence and cruelty of the Trump administration. It encouraged federal agents to act lawlessly and in ways that led to an innocent woman, Renee Good, being shot, including in the head at point-blank range, and an innocent man, Alex Pretti, being shot 10 times within five seconds, according to forensic experts. Pretti was on his knees, restrained, posing no apparent threat, when he was riddled with bullets.
What makes things even worse is that after the innocent were gunned down, administration officials hit the airwaves to slander the dead, accusing them of acts of “domestic terrorism” and, in Pretti’s case, of being a “would-be assassin,” in the words of the president’s most influential aide, Stephen Miller.
[Isaac Stanley-Becker: Tim Walz fears a Fort Sumter moment in Minneapolis]
These grotesque lies brought additional, immense pain to grieving families and friends. The Pretti family called the government’s lies “sickening” and “reprehensible.” And those lies forced people who loved Pretti to tell about the man they knew—a “kindhearted soul,” in the words of his parents; a beloved mentor and a calm presence; caring toward young friends and colleagues; diligent and respectful; a great listener who had an easy smile.
“We just really wanted to be like him, because he was cool without trying,” J. D. Atkins, who described Pretti as a role model to younger students, told The New York Times. “And as an adult I realize, it’s because he was kind to everybody.”
“He cared about people,” Pretti’s friend Heather Zielinski told NPR. “He was just living a good life.”
BUT FROM THESE AWFUL, SEARING MOMENTS in Minneapolis, we have learned a couple of encouraging things. The first is that in this instance, the Trump administration’s effort to gaslight the public failed. So often it has succeeded, at least with vast swaths of the county. The most obvious examples are the violent assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, but there are dozens more.
The administration’s massive, multifront, round-the-clock assault on truth is perhaps the greatest danger it poses. So the fact that it failed in this case is no small thing; the administration is in retreat, reportedly frustrated more with the coverage of events than with the killings themselves.
Trump, perhaps sensing that promulgating Orwellian lies wouldn’t be easy, given what happened in Minneapolis, didn’t spend his time promoting them. He left that to his subordinates, who have much less standing with his supporters.
Still, 10 years into the Trump era, to see the administration abjectly fail to psychologically manipulate the citizenry—to brazenly deceive and brainwash, to claim that black is white and justice is injustice—is somewhat reassuring. In this case, it took multiple videos of the execution-like killings. But I’ll take progress where I can find it.
The second thing we saw is that peaceful mass protests inspired by a sense of justice can succeed. Mobilization works. In this instance, the protests were combined with citizen surveillance of marauding federal agents, primarily through the use of smartphone recordings. It served “a kind of double purpose,” Charles Homans wrote in the Times: “capturing evidence and also capturing the narrative, showing the world what Trump’s immigration crackdown looked like in practice.”
Minneapolitans also distributed whistles to alert people to ICE’s whereabouts. We’re seeing a stirring example of what my colleague Adam Serwer calls “neighborism—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from,” whether they were born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu.
What the good and brave patriots of Minneapolis, and those who traveled to Minneapolis to express solidarity, are demonstrating is, in Serwer’s words, “a real resistance, broad and organized and overwhelmingly nonviolent, the kind of movement that emerges only under sustained attacks by an oppressive state. Tens of thousands of volunteers—at the very least—are risking their safety to defend their neighbors and their freedom.”
Because what Minneapolitans have done has worked, others will learn from it. The feeling of powerlessness that so many Americans have struggled with during Trump’s second term is giving way to a sense of greater agency. Americans are not merely corks in Trump’s raging ocean. Courage inspires courage. Success inspires imitation. Living in truth; cultivating the sphere of truth; joining together to stand for truth and against intimidation, repression, and state-sanctioned violence—all of this still matters.
“The historical record clearly shows,” Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan wrote in Why Civil Resistance Works, “that civil resistance is an enduring force for change.” The authors point out that when it’s done right, it can lead to shifts in loyalty even among erstwhile supporters of repressive regimes, including members of the military. Not everyone is beyond reach.
[Robert F. Worth: Welcome to the American winter]
We’ve learned a third lesson as well: What has to precede depolarization is resolute defiance of attempts to violate America’s core ideals. Efforts to bridge partisan divides are admirable, and we’ve seen success here and there. But they aren’t enough, and in some ways, they deny an important reality: The Trump coalition isn’t interested in decreasing polarization or increasing mutual understanding. That isn’t surprising, because Trump himself is the most divisive, vengeance-driven president in American history. His supporters take their cues from him.
The first order of business, then, is to effectively resist and then defeat Trump and the MAGA movement. The rest can follow from that. Defeating Trump should be done with integrity, without violence, and without deploying dehumanizing tactics. But right now, given the dark passions that have been unleashed within MAGA and the leader of the movement, who stokes those passions several times each day, the chances of large-scale depolarization are vanishingly small.
We have seen, time and time again, that the MAGA movement is rooted in pulsating resentments and overpowering hatreds, even in evangelical- and fundamentalist-Christian communities, where one might hope to find the “ministry of reconciliation” alive and well. But friends of mine who are pastors privately admit that ugliness has found a home in the hearts of many of those who claim to be followers of Jesus. And many of those ministers don’t know what to do about it.
We cannot implant a generosity of spirit or a desire for civic comity in those who see such things as weaknesses. Isaiah’s injunction—“Come now, and let us reason together”—doesn’t always apply when emotions are inflamed. That doesn’t mean that one day it won’t, or even that in individual cases it can’t. But we cannot make the wish the father of the thought.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, which is rightly held up as an example of how to heal a society, succeeded, but only after the apartheid government was defeated, not before. The moral appeals of Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu didn’t move the hearts of the apartheid regime or many of its supporters until they had lost power.
We need to be realistic. We still have three years left in Trump’s second term, and his descent into madness will continue.
My brother—a retired police captain with 35 years’ experience who is looking at all of this with horror—told me that he sees sending a politicized ICE force and the National Guard into our cities uninvited as part of a bigger scheme. Trump believes that keeping immigration at the top of the agenda helps him portray himself as a strong and tough president. But my brother said he fears even more an attempt to normalize in the minds of the general public the presence of federal agents and military personnel on our streets.
[George Packer: What should Americans do now?]
The withdrawal of some agents from Minneapolis could signal a tactical retreat. But even if it is, we shouldn’t lose sight of the larger picture. What happened in Minneapolis is important and won’t be forgotten. We have the beginnings of a road map to help us withstand the Trump assault.
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN is one of the great storytellers of the American journey. Many of his songs are powerful and poetic, at times indicting and at times comforting.
Yesterday, Springsteen released “Streets of Minneapolis,” which he dedicated to “the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors,” and the “memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.”
The chorus:
Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
Here in our home they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26
We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis
Alex Pretti and Renee Good died too young, standing against too much injustice. There is honor in how they died, just as there is dishonor and disgrace in those who killed them—those who pulled the trigger and those who empowered them to pull the trigger. What more becomes of the legacies of Pretti and Good, whether their deaths inspire others to push back the darkness, depends on the rest of us.
