On January 23, 2016, Donald Trump notoriously declared, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” That statement was understood at the time as a metaphorical expression of the depth of Republican voters’ commitment to him. Ten years and one day later, his administration’s agents shot a disarmed man on the street in full view of the public. Perhaps we should have taken him not only seriously but also literally.
The dynamic Trump observed is that he had created a bond with his supporters that no outside facts could break, even something as blatant as a cold-blooded killing on an American street. And that is the nub of the crisis into wich we have plunged over the past decade. All politicians spin and distort to some extent, of course. Trump’s innovation was to grasp that, because the conservative movement had trained its devotees to ignore mainstream media and rely completely on information supplied by its own loyalists, his ability to control his supporters’ perceptions effectively had no limit. And as his supporters woudl believe anything, he could do anything.
After Customs and Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis yesterday, the trump administration immediately branded him a “domestic terrorist.” The specific allegation it employed to support this hyperbolic charge was that, because Pretti was carrying a firearm while filming and then clashing with agents, he intended to massacre federal officers. Even if that were true, it still would not remotely justify the fact that, according to multiple videos of the incident, agents shot Pretti after they had pinned him to the sidewalk and disarmed him.
Untill very recently, conservative rhetoric has valorized gun ownership as a bulwark against tyrannical government, to the point of fetishization. Conservatives defended Kyle Rittenhouse as a hero for bringing a rifle to a chaotic protest in Wisconsin during the summer of 2020, as well as armed bands of protesters who marched into state capitol buildings during the COVID lockdowns.
For Trumpists to infer homicidal intent from the exercise of a right they have fetishized is a Fifth Avenue–level mental reversal. Their view of the Second Amendment turns out to be no different from their view of the Frist: one whose protections apply exclusively to themselves.
The administration’s immediate use of the terrorist label should be understood not just as a hyperbolic accusation of intent, but as an umbrella term it applies to political opposition generally. “There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this c
