Is Alex Pretti shooting a turning point for Trump?

Donald Trump has said his administration is “reviewing everything” after an intensive-care nurse was shot dead by Ice agents in Minneapolis on Saturday.

The US president’s advisers have been discussing his “aggressive deportation policies” for weeks, said The Wall Street Journal, but the shooting of Alex Pretti has “brought new urgency to those conversations”. Some of Trump’s aides see the “increasingly volatile situation” in Minneapolis as a “political liability, even as the White House has publicly doubled down on its operations”.

What did the commentators say?

Federal agents have not only killed a US citizen “like authoritarian thugs”, said Zack Beauchamp on Vox, but “their superiors in Washington justified that killing with the kind of bald-faced lie that recalls Tehran and Moscow”.

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Trump’s “sycophantic lieutenants” reacted to the shooting “with characteristic mendacity”, said Simon Marks in The i Paper. Officials described the 37-year-old nurse as a “domestic terrorist” and, despite video evidence and witness testimony to the contrary, said the federal agents acted in self-defence in the middle of an “armed struggle”. These brazen attempts to blacken Pretti’s memory, coming so soon after the shooting of Renee Good, “may serve as a turning point that sparks mass resistance towards the President and the thuggish regime that he leads”.

“Your eyes don’t lie,” Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar told NBC. The contrast between what administration officials have claimed and what millions of Americans have seen on their phones this past weekend could be “crucial” in emboldening Trump’s “Congressional critics to confront him”, said Susan Page on USA Today.

Democrats, and even some staunch Republican supporters of the president, have called for an independent investigation into the shooting. Some have indicated they would block a funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security until restrictions on Ice operations are put into place. This could lead to a stand-off in Congress or even another government shutdown – something the Trump administration is keen to avoid.

In this fight, “Democrats will prevail if they focus on a narrow set of reasonable demands”, while the president “will gain the upper hand if the left clamours for abolishing Ice” altogether, said The Washington Post editorial board.

What next?

Today, Trump sent his Border Czar, Tom Homan, to Minnesota. He had previously threatened to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act and flood Minneapolis with even more military force but he seemed to change course late on Sunday. Such a “violent approach” is “unlikely to succeed in a country like the US”, said Beauchamp on Vox. Its domestic security forces “are not equipped for the level of extreme brutality necessary to make it work in the face of growing public outrage”.

“How Trump responds to the democratic outpouring” on Minnesota’s streets and to the “growing unease” even in his own party “will determine just how dark and brutal the next few months will be”.