As recently as last week, the official White House line was that Renee Good, the Minnesotan who was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, deserved to be seen as a “deranged lunatic” who was engaged in “domestic terrorism.”
During his mind-numbing White House press conference Tuesday, Donald Trump adopted a very different tone, saying that he “felt terribly” about what transpired.
ICE agents, the president said, are “going to make mistakes sometimes. ICE is going to be too rough with somebody. … They’re going to make a mistake. Sometimes it can happen.”
Specifically referring to Good, he called her death a “tragedy” and a “horrible thing” — before getting to the heart of the matter.
Trump explained that he’d learned that the victim’s father “was a tremendous Trump fan,” referring to himself in the third person. “He was all for Trump. Love Trump. … A lot of people said, ‘Oh, he loves you.’”
The president concluded, “I hope he still feels that way.”
It was a painful reminder that to Trump’s way of thinking, one of the most notable things about Good was how much one of her relatives liked him. The president was perfectly comfortable with his White House publicly condemning the victim, right up until he discovered her father’s political views, at which point it became time for a shift — which is every bit as morally vacuous as it sounds.
And then, speaking of the ICE shooting that took Good’s life, the Republican concluded, “It just happens.” No, it does not. We’re not talking about a natural disaster, we’re talking about an act of deadly violence perpetrated by a federal agent against an unarmed civilian. What’s more, if the president genuinely believes that ICE agents are “going to make mistakes sometimes,” he could support federal investigations into such “mistakes.” Except, in this instance, that’s not happening. Despite the fact that, according to The Washington Post, an FBI agent in Minnesota conducted an initial review of the shooting “and determined that sufficient grounds existed to open a civil rights probe into the actions of Jonathan Ross, the officer who shot Good,” Trump’s Justice Department quickly decided to shut down any additional federal scrutiny of what transpired. Indeed, we’re left with a related question that the administration has so far failed to address: If Team Trump has decided there will be no federal investigation into the Good killing, will administration officials agree to get out of the way of state and local law enforcement, which remain interested in learning what happened?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
Latest Post
Recommended
