After two deadly shootings in confrontations between Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and the activists obstructing them, Minneapolis was starting to remind people of Kent State. By “people” we mean progressive baby boomers, inclined to make the Vietnam War the measure of all things. For them, the massacre of four student protesters by a nervous detachment of Ohio national guardsmen in 1970 alerted parents to the war’s inhumanity. It started the groundswell against Richard Nixon that would force him to exit the war three years later – and the White House the year after that.
The analogy is a bad one. Trump’s position differs a lot from Nixon’s.
It’s stronger politically. Trump’s war on the open-borders policy he inherited from Joe Biden has more support than the Asian quagmire Nixon inherited from Lyndon Johnson. Americans had scant interest in fighting communism in Indochina, telling Gallup as early as February 1966 that they would prefer “having the UN try to work out a solution,” by 78 percent to 7. Expelling illegal migrants, by contrast, is popular in America and (increasingly) around the world. According to a recent Harvard poll, 54 percent of Americans favor “deporting immigrants who are here illegally,” a number that rises to 80 percent for immigrants who have committed other crimes. Congress has made ICE the nation’s best-funded law-enforcement agency, raising its budget from $6 billion to $85 billion in a decade. The multibillion-dollar welfare fraud committed in Minnesota by organized Somali migrant groups ought to make Trump unassailable.
Roughly 2,000 ICE agents were detailed to Minneapolis, beefed up in early January by an additional 1,000 border-patrol personnel. The migrants they target are generally men of military age who have spent their life’s savings and faced danger to get to the US, and might be armed. Is it reasonable to expect them to surrender without a fight? These are not traffic stops. They are SWAT-style operations that require timing and surprise, and that is precisely what anti-ICE forces are trying to obstruct.
In large government operations, things go wrong. If a snowstorm buries the East Coast, people will get run over by snowplows. If a vaccine is developed to fight a pandemic, some recipients will have bad reactions. If thousands of agents are carrying out raids with live ammunition, bad decisions will be made and people will wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Governing kills people. It is part of the burden of democracy to accept responsibility for that.
Governing kills people. It is part of the burden of democracy to accept responsibility for that
In Minnesota, it has killed fewer people than one might expect. Renée Good, who accelerated her car at an ICE officer while being encouraged by a fellow protester to “Drive, baby, drive!” had no way of knowing she was driving toward someone who a few months ago had been dragged 100 yards behind a speeding car by an immigrant resisting arrest. Alex Pretti was tackled by agents after spitting at them and damaging an ICE vehicle in early January, and arrived to his final protest carrying a SIG Sauer P320 9mm semi-automatic pistol equipped with three extended clips capable of firing 63 rounds. Without exonerating the officers, we can note extenuating circumstances in both cases. Neither was a cold-blooded killing, whatever social media might say. Neither discredits the ICE campaign as a whole. And yet the campaign is showing signs of having been discredited. Why?
Let us return to Kent State: if Trump’s policies are better than Nixon’s, his character is worse. The immigration roundup began to fail on the morning of December 15, weeks before the agents were sent. Americans awakened to discover that the actor-director Rob Reiner and his wife – Trump opponents both – had been murdered in Los Angeles. Americans also discovered a Truth Social post by the President that mocked the couple and attributed their death to “the anger [Reiner] caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome.” The following day a journalist asked him about the tweet at a press conference. “Well I wasn’t a fan of his at all,” the President said. “He was a deranged person as far as Trump was concerned.” While not the worst, they were likely the most uncouth words ever spoken by a sitting president. Trump capped the week by renaming the Kennedy Center – a memorial to a slain leader – after himself.
Oddly, his enemies barely noticed. To them, Trump does something boorish every day. It was among his sympathizers that the damage was done. To them – at least that subset of them indifferent enough to Trump’s favor to speak freely, like the freshly exiled Marjorie Taylor Greene – this behavior cast Trump’s whole governing enterprise in a different light. When decent people speak of someone who has just died, they understand that they are in the presence of God or, if you prefer, eternity – something that dwarfs our earthly preoccupations, from stamp collecting to immigration enforcement. To say Trump outraged the religious sensibilities of his followers is to put too fine a point on it – what he did that week would have outraged the religious sensibilities of a stone.
While understanding that political action can be deadly, Americans take for granted a respect for human life. If a president doesn’t share that respect, then all our measurements of acceptable risk need to be recalculated – in Iran and Venezuela and on our own streets. That is how Trump arrived in Minnesota with his enemies ready to fight and his friends beginning to worry they had fallen in with the wrong crowd.
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