Republicans straining to absolve Good’s shooter are overlooking all of this political context, deliberately and dishonestly. Your main reaction to a fascist president going full Orwell to absolve his secret police force after it has killed a protester should not be, “I dunno, maybe the first shot was justified?”
That’s why I said earlier that you can get a sense of someone’s politics from where they land here. Zeroing in narrowly on the legality of the shooting will be how anti-anti-Trumpers spin it, having it both ways as usual by declining to forthrightly defend the president while aligning themselves with him anyway by parrying left-wing criticism of what happened. Whereas celebrating the shooting, overtly or obliquely, with variations of “that’s one less lib we need to worry about” will be the province of true-blue MAGA psychopaths.
Last night entrepreneur Arnaud Bertrand drew a provocative picture of Trump’s recent moves on foreign policy by connecting a few dots. The president, he noted, has just called for a massive increase in the Pentagon’s budget, is threatening to annex neighbors’ territories, has proclaimed his very own imperial doctrine, and is withdrawing from international organizations. When the New York Timesasked him in an interview if he sees any limit on his global powers, he answered, “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
“Any student of history would tell you: All the lights are blinking scarlet red,” Bertrand observed of that pattern. “At this stage we’re not even watching warning signs anymore. We’re watching the thing itself, in motion.”
That’s how I feel about the White House’s response to the Minneapolis shooting. We’ve reached the point already, still not quite one full year into this nightmare, where everyone understood instantly yesterday that there’s no chance the agent who killed Renee Good will face federal justice even if the facts clearly show what he did was unlawful. It’s not even a matter of Trump pardoning him; it’s unthinkable at this point that Pam Bondi’s rotten, servile Justice Department would prosecute him for killing an undesirable. The main role of the DOJ in this incident, per the FBI kicking state police off the case, will be to shield the agent from accountability under Minnesota law rather than ensure it.
The thing itself is in motion. Wake up.