Donald Trump Is Frightened

The media verdict is in: President Trump has “softened” his stance on his paramilitary war on Minneapolis. He struck a “cooperative tone” in a call with Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz. The administration hopes to “shift its strategy” on its ICE raids. Trump is executing a “pivot” and is attempting to “deescalate.”

You get the idea: Trump is chastened by the backlash to the ICE murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. So he’s now recalibrating the government’s approach in an effort to appear to dial down the violent social conflict that’s been unleashed.

So let’s stipulate some threshold questions: Will any of this change how ICE is actually conducting its operations in American cities that fundamentally do not want ICE’s presence among their populations? Is Trump reversing the underlying reality of these operations—that they have become akin to military occupations of enemy territory within the American nation? Will there be serious governmental efforts to investigate those shootings, mete out accountability for them, and address what went wrong?

The answers to those questions sure look like “no,” “no,” and “no.” To wit, The Wall Street Journal reports that some Trump aides have realized that all this has become a “political liability,” so they’re in discussions over “how to continue deportations without clashing with protesters.” They’re also planning new steps to “improve ICE’s image.”

Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that Trump met with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for two hours amid “concern” about the shootings. But Noem’s job is safe. Trump has replaced the public face of the Minneapolis occupation, removing Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino, who swaggers around these scenes of occupation like a conquering general, with border czar Tom Homan, who swaggers around on Fox News like a conquering general.

Note the problem here. Trump does apparently want to minimize clashes between government security services and protesters. But he doesn’t appear to want those heavily armed government militias to stop doing the things that are causing those clashes in the first place.

What’s really going on here is this: Trump is looking to defuse anger among congressional Democrats for purposes that don’t portend a meaningful shift. An administration official gave away the game to Punchbowl News, admitting that these “de-escalatory measures” are about placating Senate Democrats so they don’t seize this moment to demand restrictions on ICE as part of any government funding package.

The problem for the White House, Punchbowl reports, is that if Democrats successfully renegotiate new measures, the House might have to pass a new package—the House already passed funding that included money for DHS—and Republicans doubt that’s possible. So the show of de-escalation is about making it easier for Senate Democrats to support appropriations bills that don’t require another vote in the House.

If anything, this should stiffen the resolve of Senate Democrats to demand major restrictions on ICE at a minimum. As Bill Kristol notes, Trumpworld is showing weakness—so it’s time to “increase the pressure.”

The key point, however, is that all this is about avoiding an outcome where Congress seriously restricts DHS. The goal is to not change the overall approach.

This is driven home by a new letter that Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, just sent to Attorney General Pam Bondi. The letter points out that the FBI does not appear to be investigating the shootings of Pretti or Good, as it typically does in such instances. It also notes that the feds obstructed state investigations into both killings.

In an interesting move, Raskin demands information documenting who made those decisions and how they were made:

DOJ’s coverup of these killings did not occur spontaneously or in isolation. Someone affirmatively ordered FBI agents to drop the civil rights investigation into Agent Ross. Someone affirmatively ordered federal law enforcement to instead investigate Ms. Good’s widow. Someone affirmatively ordered line agents to block state prosecutors from accessing key evidence. Someone is now taking the same actions with regard to the killing of another American citizen.

Bondi will throw this letter in the garbage. But it nonetheless opens a window on all the heinous wrongdoing that remains to be exposed about this entire affair. A Democratic-controlled House can use subpoenas to investigate who ordered DOJ to refrain from seriously investigating these government killings and much more.

Meanwhile, Raskin is openly inviting whistleblowers inside DOJ and DHS to approach House Democrats and disclose wrongdoing about the cover-up of the shootings and other use-of-force violations going forward.

“We are now being far more direct in asking whistleblowers to come forward in providing information that government officials won’t,” Raskin told me. “We are hopeful that people in the Department of Justice and FBI will step forward to bring us information about what’s really going on behind closed doors.”

We will really know that Trump is changing course if he allows a good-faith investigation into the government’s killing of U.S. citizens to proceed. And that isn’t happening anytime soon.

Still, Trump has visibly been caught off guard by what he’s unleashed. He senses that Democrats now have unexpected leverage over him—hence his effort to placate them before they restrict DHS. He sees that the public has turned sharply against him over the occupations and the smearing of the victims—so he instructed press secretary Karoline Leavitt to distance him from Stephen Miller’s description of Pretti as a “domestic terrorist,” and he now has his aides leaking word of his “pivot” and “de-escalation.”

And Trump surely knows the DOJ cover-up of these killings is creating a wealth of new, sordid revelations for investigative reporters—and, possibly, a Democratic House—to unearth. He now claims to want an “honorable and honest investigation” that he personally will be “watching over.”

There won’t be any such “honorable investigation.” Yet Trump, who is predisposed to smearing the victims himself but displays political canniness at unpredictable moments, clearly sees that the ethnonationalist ideologues around him—Miller and JD Vance, who harbor malice toward allies of immigrants and thus eagerly savaged the dead—are taking this to a politically perilous place.

As Nicholas Grossman demonstrates at Liberal Currents, these killings have penetrated deep into information spaces that Trump and MAGA typically dominate. And Trumpworld is clearly aware of it. All this has seriously gotten away from Trump, taking on popular momentum that can no longer be channeled and controlled. And let’s be clear: Trump, the self-imagined master manipulator of popular passions, plainly knows this at least as well as anyone else does.