Ink Tea Stone Leaf

There’s not much I can add to the story of what happened in Minneapolis yesterday—the murder of Renee Nicole Good by agents of ICE, for the offense of having been watching them (which is not a crime), and then trying to drive away from them.

I can tell you that the official stance of the Trump Administration, that Good was a “domestic terrorist” who ran over one of the agents, is absolute bullshit. You can tell by watching the video of the encounter: nobody is run over. One person is injured, namely the murder victim. Renee Nicole Good was murdered by a representative of the Federal Government, and now the Federal Government is slandering her and lying about the circumstances. She was not a criminal, and she was not a terrorist. She was a mother and a poet.

I read in the New York Times that Donald Trump actually screened the video for a group of reporters after repeating the claim that the ICE agent had been run over. The video did not magically rearrange events to confirm his assertion, and the reporters told him so. He did not acknowledge that he had been incorrect, because rule number one in the Trump playbook is to never admit you are wrong about anything under any circumstances. He learned that lesson from his old lawyer Roy Cohn, the noxious McCarthyite who flagrantly abused the legal system in order to transform it into an instrument of raw power, and showed Trump all the benefits he could reap from employing people with no sense of responsibility to anything except pleasing Trump.

We can fantasize all we like about the one outrage that will go too far, and cause all Americans to hang their heads in shame and soberly begin the process of reform, determined never to repeat the tragedy that finally put a stop to the madness. But it doesn’t work like that, because the hard core of Trump’s constituency abides by his simple rule: never admit you were wrong, never admit that what was wrong was wrong, never admit that what happened was real.

There is only one possible response to this moment: for the people who are capable of shame to recognize that Trump and his administration and his brownshirts and his ICE will never be shamed into decent behavior, and can only be opposed and defeated and ultimately brought to justice for subjecting the American people and the rest of the world to their lawlessness and violence, and for lying to us about it at every turn. The Trump regime and its enablers will not hold themselves accountable for their crimes. They will not do our work for us.

Let fury have the hour—anger can be power. You know that you can use it.