Minnesota

The Death of an American

Alex Pretti sounds like someone I know. My friend is also a veteran, a former combat surgeon, still involved in emergency room service. He sometimes carries a pistol, for government-approved law enforcement work. He is one of the finest people I know. And I know—I just know—that if he had seen that woman pushed down in the street in Minneapolis, he would done the exact same thing as Alex Pretti: tried to pull her out of danger, asking: “Are you okay. Are you okay?” He’s normally pretty outspoken, my friend, but he didn’t want to speak today, so I won’t use his name.

He was the first person I thought of when I saw the footage of Alex Pretti’s murder. My stomach turned; I yelled “NONONONO” at the tv—a perfectly futile, but symbolic act: we are a nation screaming at our TVs from our separate sidelines.

The ICE thugs reminded me of others, too: members of the religious police, the BASIJ, in Iran, whom I once saw go sheer violent bonkers during a peaceful political rally in Tehran. I never knew I could run so fast. Adrenaline—a drug that can be poison when loosed in the armed, untrained body of a terrified law enforcement officer as we’ve seen these past few weeks—is potent stuff.

And so, I’m somewhere beyond furious. I feel they murdered a friend of mine. (My friend allowed that he identified completely with Alex Pretti.) And if someone wants to organize a vast national peaceful protest against this disgraceful police behavior, I’ll be there.

I’ve been reluctant to go whole-hog crazy about the Trump Administration, even against ICE. I’ve believed that overstating the case, comparing our morally minuscule little tinpot to Hitler only played into Trump’s hands, empowering his cult. I still believe that the best thing that could happen in Minneapolis right now is for all the protesters go home, especially those least likely to do so: the useful leftist idiots who want the same chaos that Trump does. I’d hope we’d all reassemble in a national protest led by our political leaders. I’d hope our four former presidents, and the dozens of disgusted former general officers, and an army of spiritual leaders, would lead the march. Maybe we could get the Pope to fly in. We surely need a catharsis, a cleansing of the stench unleashed by this Trump, whose cult only extends to about one-third of our people.

There is talk that we’ve finally reached the long-awaited “inflection” point, where even Republicans turn against Trump. Perhaps we have. If so, it’s because Trump’s fetid lies and fantasies have finally met their sell-by date. It is remarkable that he’s been able to get away with it for so long. The lies about Covid cures, the lies about the 2020 election, the lies about his fake electors, his Epstein obfuscations, his Greenland and Peace Board fantasies. He could get away with those because it was difficult to marshal solid, visible, tangible evidence against him. But that has changed in Minneapolis. We now have the receipts.

We can see with our own eyes that Trump and his ridiculous DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and her mini-martinet Greg Bovino are not only lying, but in the most squalid ways possible. Renee Good, a domestic terrorist who “plowed” her car into an ICE agent? Alex Pretti, another domestic terrorist who wanted to “massacre” ICE agents? If any acts of terror were committed in Minneapolis, they were perpetrated by the thugs with batons and guns and masks and hidden name plates. And I suspect the contrast between what Trump says and what people actually see could make some difference this time. I would hope the vast majority of Americans—certainly the overwhelming majority of Americans I’ve met on my reportorial road trips—would see those videos and react the same way I did: with revulsion.

That probably won’t happen, either. We’ve been drugged by ennui. We believe we’re hopeless and we are—because we rarely exercise our moral muscles to do good. In that sense, we are the exact opposite of Alex Pretti—and also my friend, and others like them—who are not hopeless, who work for others every day, who understand the sense of purpose—the joy—that comes with service and sacrifice. Donald Trump’s endless effort to denigrate such efforts, to call our military suckers and losers, and to call our allies’ troops even worse, are an abomination. His is a moral stain that will linger in history and splash back on the reputations of the rest of us, not just those who elected him, but also those who did nothing when he proved to be so comprehensively disgraceful.