A Tale of Two Shootings

The Trump administration expects us to trust them when, at every turn, they continue to prove they are unequivocally untrustworthy.

On Wednesday, January 7, 2026, a woman in a maroon SUV was shot and killed by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, MN.

On Thursday, January 8, 2026, two persons in a red pickup truck were shot by a Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officer and were subsequently hospitalized in Portland, OR, where they remain in custody.

DHS’s response to the first shooting, prior to any investigation of the incident and while the body was still warm, was to hold a press conference in which Kristi Noem created a narrative based not on facts, not on evidence, not on eyewitness testimony, not on video footage of the event, but rather on pure conjecture intended to support her corrupt administration’s existing messaging.

Video of the shooting from multiple angles, captured by bystanders, proves in numerous ways that her narrative is full of misstatements, alternate facts, prevarications — oh, hell, it was a bunch of lies. As the mayor of Minneapolis said so eloquently, “that was bullshit.”

The ICE agent who shot the victim is shown walking through the crime scene and leaving the scene. Other ICE agents left the scene in their vehicles, thereby tainting the crime scene — actions that bring into question any results of any investigation of the incident.

Newly surfaced video taken by the shooter himself shows the victim in a jovial, friendly mood, telling the shooter she wasn’t mad at him. Twenty seconds later, Renee Nicole Good is dead from bullets fired by the ICE agent.

Instead of partnering with local law enforcement to conduct a thorough investigation (which would be standard operating procedure in such an incident), the FBI immediately became territorial and refused to allow participation in the investigation by local law enforcement.

DHS’s response to the second shooting once again was to rush to identify the victims definitively as members of Tren de Aragua. They stated that CBP had been tracking them and that the driver of the truck “weaponized his vehicle and attempted to run over the law enforcement agents.” They claimed the targets of their tracking had been involved in sex trafficking.

To date, no video of the shooting or the arrest has surfaced. So the only narrative we have of that incident is that of the administration — the administration that only hours before lied repeatedly to the cameras about another shooting to spin the narrative in their favor.

The shooting victims in the Portland scenario may very well be Tren de Aragua members, or maybe they aren’t. Maybe they were sex traffickers, or maybe they weren’t. Maybe the woman in the truck was an accomplice, or maybe she was a victim. Maybe one day, we will learn the truth, or maybe we won’t.

Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield has stated that he and his office will investigate the victims on sex trafficking charges — an investigation that the federal government has no say in. But it’s entirely possible — perhaps even likely — that we will ever know the full story, given how much obfuscation has already happened in both these incidents.

Trump and his cronies always manage to seem indignant when the media and the electorate don’t take their word at face value. But what have any of them ever done to engender the trust that would be necessary to take them at their word about anything?

In Trump’s first term, journalists documented well over 30,000 lies that Trump himself told — some small, some big, some whoppers (or should I say, “Big Macs”?).

In his second term, as in his first, they have regularly rewritten the “truth” to fit their own agenda. Some of their lies have been downright laughable (like the promise to lower prescription drug prices by 8000%).

There’s a slow, steady, quiet downward spiral happening here. It looks like this:

• Someone in the administration (usually but not always Trump himself) intentionally or inadvertently says or does something outrageous.

• The public objects and Trump’s approval numbers move downward.

• Thinking he can still bamboozle the public, Trump lashes out, lies, or blames someone else (or any combination of the three).

• His approval numbers move further downward as a result of the administration’s response.

• The next outrageous thing occurs, which displaces the current outrageous thing in the public consciousness, and the cycle starts again.

During his first term, we all witnessed this cycle repeat itself. But during that term, Trump still had enough support from GOP moderates that he could withstand it. There were also a few people in his administration who could temper his worst impulses. To some extent, Trump even got away with the cycle repeating during the first year of this term.

But the effect of a cycle like this endlessly repeating is that, over time, Trump has significantly eroded his own support. There’s no one left to blame it on, although he won’t cease trying. It’s not like there is an endless supply of untapped MAGA voters who are suddenly going to jump onboard; the “ride-or-die” MAGA supporters are already in his camp. His behavior only serves to chip away at the trust of his remaining marginally less zealous supporters.

Throughout his time in politics, Trump has surrounded himself with people who will do his bidding and defend him, no matter what. In this term, however, he has surrounded himself with people who are as defensive as he is. All cabinets are presumed to have a certain amount of loyalty to the president they serve. But this batch is reflexively hyper-defensive by proxy, no matter what the issue is.

Just watch Kristi Noem or Karoline Leavitt or Pete Hegseth the next time they’re in a position to answer questions from the now hand-picked press corps. Invariably, they will interrupt the reporter asking the question and talk over them before the question is finished being asked, if they even get a whiff that it might be an embarrassing question. They might be able to badger reporters into temporary silence but, over the long haul, they further diminish any remaining trust the public may have in their administration and its policies.

As they say in the news business, this is a developing story — both the stories of the shootings themselves and the administration’s response to them. But at least one thing seems pretty clear to me: the more Trump and his defenders obstruct the public’s desire to get to the truth, the more determined the public will be to seek out the truth. If the Epstein debacle has taught us anything, it’s exactly that.