The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 13 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
There have been a lot of ugly developments around the horrific killing of a mom in Minneapolis by an ICE agent last week. Donald Trump has offered a vile new excuse for the shooting. Kristi Noem had an ugly moment while commenting on the agent’s conduct. And a new report finds that there have been far more shootings into vehicles than you might have thought. Meanwhile, over the weekend, we saw massive popular protests against ICE. Yet if anything, Trump officials are only digging in harder and being more contemptuous of those who are upset by the killing. It sure looks like Trumpworld sees this as an opportunity to further antagonize blue America, and it’s proceeding accordingly. Tim Dickinson, a senior writer for The Contrarian, attended an anti-ICE protest in Portland over the weekend and talked to some people about what Renee Good’s death means to them. So we’re talking to him about all this. Tim, good to have you on.
Tim Dickinson: Hey, it’s great to be with you.
Sargent: So, Renee Nicole Good was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, and multiple videos showed that the agent was simply not in life-threatening danger before opening fire three times. Video that was supposed to present the agent’s perspective wasn’t in any way exculpatory. Trump was asked on Sunday night whether deadly force was really necessary. Here’s what he said.
Donald Trump (voiceover): It was highly disrespectful of law enforcement. The woman and her friend were highly disrespectful of law enforcement, you saw that. They were harassing, they were following for days or for hours. I think frankly they’re professional agitators. We are going to find out who’s paying for it.
Sargent: Note that Trump says both Good and her partner were highly disrespectful to law enforcement—as if that makes it okay. And that they’re going to investigate who’s behind all this agitation. So they’re threatening to use this to crack down on the left. Your response to all that?
Dickinson: Well, that’s their playbook, right? Anytime they see dissent—they tend to characterize it as inorganic and paid for by George Soros or some other bogeyman. And they don’t seem to either comprehend that people could disagree in good faith, or they’re just using this politically to try and crack down on left-wing dissent as though it were terrorism or some sort of organized movement that is also deserving of state violence.
Sargent: Yeah, I mean, everybody’s a terrorist, right? So the second we learned about this shooting, Kristi Noem runs out and says that this officer was the victim of domestic terrorism. A suburban mom who was gunned down in her vehicle is actually a domestic terrorist. People are upset about that. They’re also terrorists. There’s no end to the terrorism, there, Tim?
Dickinson: No, and the amazing thing is that the officer’s firsthand video from the cellphone showed Renee Good saying, “I’m not mad at you.” Her lack of fear seemed to be as much the problem as her wife’s taunting him as a big boy and maybe making a fat joke about him before he switched hands, reached for his gun. So there seems to have been the officer’s rage involved in this as much as any threat to his life.
Sargent: So, Tim, The Wall Street Journal had this incredibly damning report. [It] found that since July, there have been 13 examples of agents firing at or into civilian vehicles. Eight have been shot this way, with two confirmed dead. Tim, that really underscores the degree to which this agency is completely out of control. It’s a rogue pariah agency.
Yet what strikes me is Trump’s officials are not even acknowledging any kind of problem here. Like, ordinarily you’d have high-level government officials saying, okay, we’ve got to look at this. We do seem to have some kind of problem here. There’s something systemically wrong. Nothing. What do you make of that, Tim?
Dickinson: Well, no, and in fact, there’s a rush to judgment the other way: that she was a terrorist and he was a hero and he did what he needed to do to save his life and this, by golly, confirms that he was hit when in fact the last thing he would have seen was her turning her wheels away from him.
And so clearly the DHS agents are poorly trained. Folks who have experience on the Border Patrol are used to getting away with a lot. The people that they are policing are marginalized, don’t have access to lawyers, and the first resort is often to violence.
And often I’ve done reporting on people who’ve gone after migrants, chased them down in cars and hit them with cars, right? So they seem empowered to escalate rather than de-escalate. It’s a matter of practice.
Sargent: You know, that brings up a point that I think Andrew Sullivan made that was quite powerful. He said on Twitter that these guys are operating largely with impunity, if only because in a very high-profile situation like this one, any one of these agents can essentially count on a Trump pardon at the end of the day. These guys are accustomed already to operating with something close to impunity.
But in this larger tinderbox context, it seems to me that, like, it’s even worse. Anytime liberals say that a shooting was unjustified, Trump and MAGA [are] going to rush in and defend the officer, which means maybe a pardon at the end of the day.
Dickinson: Or have JD Vance going out and [saying] that they have absolute immunity—which isn’t technically true; there’s qualified immunity, which involves making reasonable decisions as an officer. And it seems from the video evidence that this is totally unreasonable.
You saw these videos over the weekend of officers interacting with people around Minnesota saying, Didn’t you learn anything from this weekend?—even when they were getting lip from constituents, essentially, people who aren’t doing anything illegal but might be being annoying to officers as a matter of resistance.
Sargent: It’s absolutely appalling. I want to bring up another thing in the Wall Street Journal report—there’s another damning fact in it. It said all these incidents started with immigration agents blocking cars, but they’re not supposed to do that, are they?
There’s, like, no indication that ICE higher-ups are examining any of this in any way. Is there? And partly this is created by the fact that the GOP Congress sides with Trump on everything and won’t exercise any oversight of any kind. Yes. I mean, this is highly unusual and really pretty frightening.
Dickinson: Well, you have these very high-stakes confrontations, and this happened in Portland shortly after Renee Good’s death.
We had, at a medical office, two Border Patrol agents come up and try and do a targeted stop of a woman and her husband. As [it] turned out, they drove into the parking lot behind them and blocked them off with cars, right? It was a very aggressive maneuver, and they came out of their cars, and the affidavits we have today said that they came up and approached this guy who was the driver and not the target of the stop.
His response was to start backing up. He had a big truck, backed up into the rental car that the Border Patrol people had, and kept ramming it to try and get away. And during this ramming incident—there’s no body cam footage, which is curious—one of the Border agents just shot the guy and ended up hitting him and hitting his wife. And so that’s [the] story of these two people here locally in Portland who were shot and then drove away and ultimately had to stop and get medical help from the local authorities.
So this is the second and again, they claim that there was a weaponization of the vehicle. Was that true? Like, there actually the guy clearly caused damage to the rental vehicle, but did he actually endanger anyone’s life? I mean, Border Patrol is supposed to have body cameras, but they didn’t in this case, which is peculiar.
Sargent: Well, I want to bring up what Kristi Noem said. The officer’s name in the Minneapolis shooting is Jonathan Ross. We’ve seen in the videos that somebody, probably the officer himself, said “fucking bitch” after the shooting. CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Noem about this. Listen.
Jake Tapper (voiceover): Is that Agent Ross’s voice calling Renee Goode a fucking bitch?
Kristi Noem (voiceover): I can’t determine which one it is, but it could be.
Sargent: If you watch this exchange, Noem did kind of a weird little grin after saying that. I don’t know what she meant by doing that, but beyond that, I just want to keep stressing here: There’s no glimmer of any desire on their part to reassure people troubled by the shooting. There’s no effort to let them know that it’s unacceptable for these officers who are public servants to talk this way to people and to treat them this way. Why not? Why is there no thing like that?
Dickinson: Well, there’s a total double standard because it was—we heard from Trump, he said that the reason for shooting essentially was that these people had shown disrespect to the officers. And here is an officer of the law empowered with deadly violence calling the person he just shot a “fucking bitch.” And so this—this idea of respect only goes one way in their view of things, right?
And so, you know, these are the same people, the same political movement that has had Don’t Tread on Me on their bumper stickers forever. But apparently that only applies to them, right? Don’t tread on them, but they’ll tread on you in a second. And so it’s clear that they want people to be afraid and they want people to have, you know, this fear that the consequence for standing up to this unaccountable political movement is to risk your own life. Even through nonviolent resistance. And so that’s really troubling.
Sargent: Yeah, it seems very clear to me that they want people to come away with that message that you’re talking about. But luckily people are stepping up anyway.
You attended a protest in Portland and you talked to some of the protesters. The main message you heard was that people are determined not to let Renee Good’s death pass without accomplishing some good. Can you talk about what you saw out there?
Dickinson: Well, there were a number of speeches, and people were talking about Renee Good dying for justice, which I found kind of peculiar, but it seemed a way to try and turn her into a martyr for something bigger here—that people can look to that death not as totally senseless, but as somebody whose bravery needs to be honored, and to keep pushing forward and not retreat.
So there was a lot of these protests… there were no King’s events particularly. You saw the inflatable frogs in Portland—there’s been a little bit of frivolity to the whole protest atmosphere here of late—but at this protest, things were very somber.
We had a local city councilor, who’s herself a Paraguayan immigrant, just vowing to hold the line as a matter of city policy and to push back against ICE, but calling on everybody there to do their part, to stand up and not—not to be intimidated, and to keep speaking out and to keep showing up and to use their privilege to fight for people who are more vulnerable.
Sargent: I just don’t really understand what’s going through the heads of some of these administration officials. Obviously, there’s this usual thing where they just have to do exactly what the MAGA God King says, and there’s no scenario anytime, anywhere under which you can admit any shred of fallibility on the MAGA God King’s part, right?
And then there’s Trump’s own directive, which is that you never, ever admit you were wrong. You never retreat. You never apologize. You only attack, attack, attack. And I get all that. But here we’re in a situation where there are nationwide protests about a brutal killing of a person by an officer on the line of duty. They don’t want to show one shred of any indication that it troubles them at all. Maybe JD Vance has said a little bit that could be interpreted that way, but then he just undercuts it.
Why are they doing that? Are they trying to antagonize us? Are they trying to create that tinderbox? Is that what they want?
Dickinson: I try not to be too cynical about that, but I definitely think that’s true. I think that Trump has been eager for a casus belli, right? He wants to be able to use the military against American people—the bad guys, the enemy within. And so, to the extent that this tinderbox is getting more explosive or more combustible by the day, they, I think, welcome that as a good development.
They’re sending more people into Minneapolis. I mean, essentially we’re having a low-grade civil conflict in Minneapolis where, you know, the people are hounding Greg Bovino when he goes into Target and they’re swarming people at gas stations. And it’s hard to understand how this isn’t going to lead to more incidents like the Renee Good shooting, just because you have these poorly trained individuals with guns who are feeling themselves under pressure.
And so that it seems to be part of the scenario that the administration has been eager for, right? Some pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act or some other authority of the president to, in fact, deploy members of the National Guard or the standing military into American cities and further project Trump’s power.
Sargent: Yeah, I think there’s no question that the fascists around Donald Trump, people like Stephen Miller, really do want him to invoke the Insurrection Act and cross the Rubicon, as it were. Tim Dickinson, awesome to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.
Dickinson: My pleasure. Thanks so much.
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