Donald Trump’s desire to name everything from the Kennedy Center to the Gulf of Mexico after himself (“I wanted to call it the Gulf of Trump,” he declared in January) can seem almost comically childish. But it has become a killing joke: his regime brands those it executes terrorists and drags their names through the dirt. This renaming is an assertion of absolute power, and the United States is at a moment when Trump’s claim to dominion over language has become lethal—both for individuals and for the American republic itself. If the murder of Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis cannot be called murder, an authoritarian regime has passed one of its crucial tests: it can reverse all meanings, turning the ultimate moral transgression upside down, making the victim the perpetrator, the perpetrator the victim.
It is striking that the capital offense for which both Pretti and Renee Good, who weeks earlier was shot multiple times at close range by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, were summarily executed was the crime of witness. Good was watching ICE at work from her car. Pretti was filming Border Patrol agents on the street. Both were engaged in the task that democracies assign to citizens: that of paying close attention to the workings of power. If the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, a country that inflicts the ultimate punishment on those who dare to be vigilant can no longer be free.
Watchfulness is the most dangerous form of resistance because it obstructs the Trump regime’s project of habituation. Fascism works by making the extreme normal. Habit, as Samuel Beckett has it, is a great deadener. It has been obvious since the start of Trump’s second term that he is trying to make the sight of armed and masked men with virtually unlimited powers one to which Americans are accustomed.
First by dispatching National Guard troops to Los Angeles and other cities, then by sending ICE contingents to Washington, Memphis, Nashville, Atlanta, Charlotte, New Orleans, Brownsville, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Newark, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis, the regime is redefining not just legal and political norms but normalcy itself. It is making the threat of arbitrary state violence routine, stitching it into the fabric of daily urban life. The hope is that most Americans can be schooled to go about their mundane preoccupations even while they are being visibly occupied.
I know, by the way, that this is quite possible. For thirty years, in parts of my native island of Ireland, troops with machine guns crouching in shop doorways or skulking in the back gardens of ordinary houses were so taken for granted that one saw them, if at all, out of the corner of one’s eye. What is always there becomes barely there at all.
This procedure of habituation is also a process of escalation. Authoritarian takeover in a long-established democracy must be gradual. And the gradations are primarily moral. The populace must be desensitized. People must get used to images of little children being kidnapped by unidentified masked agents. They must become acclimated to young women being grabbed and hustled into unmarked vans by faceless men; they must learn not to acknowledge abduction.
They must become familiar with official disappearances—an idea once confined to the outer darkness beyond the southern border but now fully domesticated. They must get used to killing—first to the out-of-the-way obscure deaths of migrants: thirty-two people died in ICE custody in 2025, often because of the authorities’ refusal to treat acute medical conditions. And then they must get used to the public, open, and flagrant killings of American citizens. In this logic of escalation, a cold-blooded summary execution is not an accident. It is a climax. The murder of Alex Pretti was in itself an obviously intentional act, but it was also politically deliberate. After the killing of Renee Good on January 7, an administration that was not bent on establishing autocracy would have called a halt to the ICE surges. Good’s death would have been treated as a disaster—not just a private calamity but a terrible governmental screwup. Trump would have made clear that it had never been meant to happen.
Of course he and his subordinates did the precise opposite, branding Good a domestic terrorist and justifying her killing as an act of both individual and institutional self-defense. But in order to make this tactic unexceptional, to establish such executions as part of the order of things, Good’s death could not be a one-off. There had to be a doubling down. Domestic terrorists, by definition, do not come alone. They are multiple—and the actions needed to defend against them must be multiplied, too.
This does not mean that Pretti’s killing was specifically ordered. But the template for it was certainly prepared in advance. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards,” says Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts. Here it is a case of justification first, execution afterwards. The license to kill Pretti was issued when Good was redefined as a domestic terrorist attempting to kill an officer.
Pretti’s scarcely cold body was stuffed into this preformulated narrative. He was a thwarted mass killer. Within hours of his murder Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller posted on X, “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.” Both Gregory Bovino, the then commander-at-large of the US Border Patrol, and Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant homeland security secretary, claimed Pretti was about to “do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem used almost the exact same phrase, leaving little doubt that it had been consciously crafted.
The big lie of the threat allegedly posed by Good is here deliberately made bigger. Good was engaged in “domestic terrorism”; Miller slipped into the plural, making Pretti merely one of “the terrorists.” (Since they are unnumbered, they could be legion.) Good was trying to kill one officer. Pretti was planning a massacre—not just of the agents present but of “law enforcement” itself. Trump’s grotesque inflation of language, his bemonstering of opposition politicians, is now fully integrated into the organized street violence of his regime. So it must always be in the authoritarian state: the existential menace can be defeated only if those who embody it can be deprived of their very existences.
It does not matter that this hyped-up story is harder to make credible than the usual kind of official lying that characterizes such killings merely as unfortunate accidents whose true cause is impossible to determine. Getting people to accept a vaguely credible account is a lesser manifestation of absolute power than getting them to accept—or even better, to just shrug their shoulders at—a wildly incredible one. There is, in much of the American media, a learned habit of shoulder shrugging, a civilized avoidance of calling an occupation an occupation, a lie a lie, a murder a murder. As Jem Bartholomew noted in the Columbia Journalism Review soon after Pretti’s killing, “The press is still squeamish about directly calling out the administration’s lies.” But this misplaced timidity in fact adds fuel to the flames. When the incendiaries are in the White House and their targets are all legal, institutional, political, civic, and moral restraints on Trump’s ability to do, as he so openly proclaims, “whatever I want,” the deadening of language has fatal consequences.
Thus, even while The New York Times did excellent work in analyzing the video footage of Pretti’s execution, it initially resorted to the bland conclusion that “videos analyzed by The New York Times appear to contradict federal accounts of the shooting.” Appear? As the paper implicitly acknowledged later, the truth is that “videos directly contradict descriptions of the encounter by administration officials.” It is good that the instinctive resort to fuzzy circumlocution was eventually overcome, but surely, once the paper’s analysis showed definitively that the administration was brazenly lying about an official murder, that ought to have been the starkest of headlines.
Meanwhile, the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal declared that although he did not deserve to be shot dead, “Pretti made a tragic mistake by interfering with ICE agents.” His error was that he “attempted, foolishly, to assist a woman who had been pepper-sprayed by agents.” It is clear from the rest of the article that the Journal believes the Trump administration to be lying about its unjustified killing of an American citizen, but the import of this otherwise astounding truth is diluted by the suggestion that he was, after all, a fool. In an authoritarian state, who but a fool would try to help a woman who has been pepper-sprayed by the great leader’s shock troops?
The sin of civic “interference” is in fact the saving grace of democracy. Good and Pretti and thousands of other citizens have been getting in the way of the armed overthrow of democratic freedoms by doing what journalism is supposed to do: pay attention to the actual, on-the-ground reality. The phone that Pretti had in his hand was a connection to a communal determination to refuse the narcotic of normalization. The videos that expose the administration’s mendacity about its own use of extreme violence against peaceful dissent are themselves products of the courage to show up, to be there, to see for yourself—the impulses journalists are supposed to value above all others, aside from the use of accurate language to name what you see.
The challenge the videos present is that of uncomfortably incontrovertible evidence—proof of sanctioned executions and of a government’s systematic lying. If the evidence so bravely gathered does not lead to a profound reversal, Trump’s temporary yielding to public outrage (diluting the smear campaign against Pretti, removing Bovino from Minneapolis, and placing the two officers who shot Pretti on administrative leave) will be merely a tactical retreat—another stage in the piecemeal habituation of Americans to the arbitrary application of martial law. The name of the condition to which the US will have surrendered itself is written all over Europe’s history books.
—January 28, 2026