THE POST-TRUTH PARADIGM: The ICE killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti illustrate how the Trump Administration has no hesitation about lying – yet the right-wing media just won’t call them on it
One of the most striking things about the horrible events in Minnesota – other that the twin ICE killings themselves – is how casually and brazenly the President of the United States and his top officials are lying about what billions of people can watch for themselves. This is not spin or selective framing but flat-out insistence that reality is negotiable and that Americans should distrust their own eyes. And right-wing media goes along.
Federal officials responded to the shooting of Alex Pretti over the weekend not merely by falsely claiming self-defense on the past of the agents, but by declaring that the victim had intended to “massacre” federal agents. “Massacre” assigns premeditation, intent to murderous many people, and monstrosity – before an investigation has even begun.
Meanwhile, multiple videos showed something totally different. The ICU nurse is seen holding a phone, retreating from agents as he is approached, and then trying to assist a woman being brutalized by ICE, before being pepper-sprayed, inexpertly wrestled to the ground, and shot numerous times. An agent seemed to discover and take away a gun for which Pretti had a license and which he as in no way brandishing – before the shooting. Here are the videos:
Of course, more investigation is needed – but based on what everyone could see, the videos all showed goons with uniforms and their faces covered doing the exact opposite of de-escalation, and being entirely responsible for the deadly episode. Were they annoyed by the whistling? I imagine so. But that, and carrying a licensed gun, are not just cause for a shooting. Based on the available evidence to date, the shooter should be prosecuted.
Just two weeks before, talking to reporters about the killing of Renee Good by one of his other ICE agents in Minnesota, Trump said: “She behaved horribly. And then she ran him over. She didn’t try to run him over. She ran him over.” He then had an aide play one of the videos. Good was smiling, told an ICE agent “I’m not mad at you,” and was clearly driving away from the agents and not toward them when she was shot in the face by Jonathan Ross. An agent then called her a “fucking bitch,” and according to witnesses, agents delayed medical attention.
The New York Times did its best to explain:
About this, Vice President J.D. Vance had the following to say: “What the press has done in lying about this innocent law enforcement officer is disgusting. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.” The Trump administration has continued to defend the shooting, claiming Good had been “weaponizing” her vehicle. The Department of Homeland “Security” said the agent fired “defensive shots” at a perpetrator of “domestic terrorism.” Remarkable, considering that what we all could see was a woman attempting to leave and being killed for it.
Here’s CNN’s analysis:
Could it be that they did not watch the videos? Or might they be assuming that we did not? Or that we are idiots?
Together, the Good and Pretti killings reveal something deeper than dishonesty. They show a governing reflex to simply lie. Evidence that contradicts the lie is discredited or ignored and witnesses are “agitators.” It is something I have seen all over the autocratic world as a foreign correspondent – and actually we have all seen it from Trump before.
Years ago, lying all the time carried a price. But that was when we had a responsible media that could be counted on to fairly make the call. Indeed, for much of the past century – in which mass media emerged, first with newspapers and then with broadcast radio and TV – the serious media was perhaps imperfect but basically dependable to a sufficient degree.
Since the 1950s and onward, ABC, NBC and CBS were not purely partisan actors, not a rival power center, but a public good. Even though, yes, they were also businesses. Newspapers and broadcasters and individual journalists may have had political leanings, but they shared a professional obligation that stood above ideology: when the government made a factual claim, it had to be tested against evidence. If it was false, it had to be called false. That was journalism’s core function.
The press existed to enforce the boundary between authority and reality. This is what Carl Bernstein called the search for the “best obtainable version of the truth.”
There was the presumption that there was a market for this, because the public did not want to be lied to by any side, and thus fairness was baked into the media’s brand equity. We can debate whether the public changed or the media changed – but this has fallen apart.
Most politicians lie, now and then. Most people probably lie, now and then. But few lie like Trump and his administration. And what has changed is that the right-wing media is in on the act; the most charitable view is that they will not often call him out, or make clear to the audience that a narrative is false. The question stopped being “Is this true?” and became “Who does this help?”
So when Trump insisted his inauguration crowd was the largest in history, right-wing media did not say what aerial photographs made obvious but reframed the issue as a petty media obsession. Trump aide Kellyanne Conway was given a friendly platform to introduce the phrase “alternative facts,” and Fox hosts treated it not as an admission of lying but as a clever rebuttal to media arrogance. The question was not framed as whether the claim was true.
The pattern became lethal during COVID. Right-wing media echoed Trump’s insistence that the virus was “like the flu,” that concern was “hysteria,” and that the danger was exaggerated for political reasons, even as hospitals filled and death counts soared.
The 2020 election hardened this practice. Right-wing media promoted claims of stolen votes, rigged machines, and mass fraud long after courts, election officials, and Trump’s own Justice Department rejected them. The Dominion lawsuit revealed that Fox executives and hosts knew these claims were false while continuing to air them. Video evidence, court rulings, and sworn testimony all existed – but the captive MAGA audience was trained to distrust them.
And the same dynamic governs everything from January 6 to tariffs. Despite thousands of hours of footage showing Trump supporters storming the Capitol, Fox promoted stories about Antifa and FBI setups. Despite basic economics, right-wing media does not prominently challenge the claims that tariffs are “paid by China,” when in fact tariffs are taxes paid by American importers and passed on to American consumers. This is Economics 101 – even if Trump insists that “we’re making a fortune,” describing an imaginary world in which foreign governments write checks to the U.S. Treasury out of submission.
In the hours after the Pretti killing, right-wing media ramped up the use of “agitators” to describe the anti-ICE protesters. While CNN was marveling at how Trump officials were ignoring and contradicting the videos from the scene, I could find no equivalent on right-wing media.
Instead, ridiculous nonsense by Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, delivered in her characteristic self-righteoud uber-confidence, claimed the victim had committed “domestic terrorism.”
The Fox headline hours after the situation uncritically cited Trump’s version: “Trump cites armed suspect, lack of police support following fatal Border Patrol shooting in Minneapolis; President claims federal agents ‘had to protect themselves’ without local police support during fatal Minneapolis shooting.”
Another headline passed on Attorney-General Pam Bondi’s version: “Bondi blames Minneapolis leaders after suspect DHS officials say was armed is killed by CBP, igniting unrest; AG says suspect ‘violently resisted,’ describes demonstrations as ‘extremely organized.’” Nothing in either article conceded the absurdity of the claims.
Meanwhile, on CNN and other non-right-wing media, reporters and analysts were clear in their skepticism. Watch ICE commander Gregory Bovino squirming as his evasions and distortions, in the service of whitewashing an murder, come under fire.
Of course, for people trapped in the post-truth paradigm, nothing matters and everyone is just seen as taking sides.
A society cannot function this way. You cannot run a modern economy, manage complex alliances, or administer justice if reality itself is treated as partisan. Evidence cannot be optional in a healthy society. The only question is whether enough Americans — and enough journalists — are willing to say what they plainly show.
We need somehow to appeal to the patriotism of the right-wing media. I know reporters who work there and have worked there, and none of them are bad people at all. Given how bad things have gotten, they need to be persuaded to think about what is being done to society. Because once a society agrees to stop believing the truth, it surrenders something essential about humanity.
