From worst of times to even worse: the Trump administration continues to spiral | Sidney Blumenthal

It was the worst of times and then even worse; it was the age of lies and then more lies; it was an epoch of preening and cowardice. In the winter of despair, it was a day of the vile and a night of the obscene. It was a tale of two films, one featuring the stark killing of a protester on a cold Minneapolis street and the other starring Melania Trump striking poses in a “documentary” shown at a private screening at the White House.

Throughout the day of Saturday, 24 January, videos of the killing by ICE agents of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at the Veterans Administration hospital, on a street in Minneapolis were broadcast endlessly on TV news channels and seen by tens of millions online. The videos clearly showed Pretti with his phone in his hand, holding his hands up as he approached ICE agents who had pepper-sprayed a woman. He was coming to her aid, a Good Samaritan. The ICE agents instantly attacked him. One frame of a video shows one agent with his gun drawn, pointed at Pretti’s back as he fell hands still in the air. Agents appear to have shot him 10 times in five seconds.

The videos plainly refuted the falsehoods instantly contrived by Trump administration officials. Pretti, as it happened, had been legally carrying a gun in his waistband, which there is no evidence he tried to wield. Despite the facts apparent multiple videos, Donald Trump declared that “ICE patriots” had to “protect themselves”, and that Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey were “inciting insurrection”, attempting to assert a predicate for his invocation of the Insurrection Act.

Senior border patrol officer Gregory Bovino, officially known as the commander-at-large, who had been directing operations in the city as he had elsewhere, claimed that Pretti intended to “massacre law enforcement” and that the ICE agents were the “victims”. Stephen Miller, the ultimate authority in the White House issuing orders on ICE operations, called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and an “assassin”. His accusations were dutifully echoed by Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, who also said that Pretti was guilty of “domestic terrorism”. These falsehoods were used goods taken off the shelf. Their condemnation of Pretti was exactly the same as their malign characterization of Renee Nicole Good, the 37-year-old mother of three murdered on 7 January in Minneapolis at point-blank range as she was driving away from a protest, saying “I’m not mad at you,” as her last words before an ICE agent suddenly shot her in the head and chest.

Trump dispatched Tom Homan, his so-called “border czar”, to investigate the Pretti incident. Homan’s re-emergence in a significant public role finally concludes his withdrawal into a subterranean version of the witness protection program after the New York Times revealed on 20 September 2025 that the FBI had recorded him receiving a paper bag marked from the Cava restaurant chain containing $50,000 in cash from FBI agents posing as contractors seeking federal largesse. Homan has denied any wrongdoing. Trump’s Department of Justice refused to pursue the case. Homan is Trump’s idea of someone to get to the bottom of a Trump administration cover-up.

If Homan has the slightest desire for restoring any credibility, he might begin his investigation into the Pretti killing by speaking with a physician who was an eyewitness and interacted with the ICE agents afterwards. From his apartment window, the doctor stated in a sworn affidavit about Pretti: “I did not see him attack the agents or brandish a weapon of any kind. Suddenly an ICE agent shoved him to the ground … I saw at least four ICE agents point guns at the man. I then saw the agents shoot the man at least six or seven times.” The doctor ran outside. “I informed the ICE agents that I am a physician, and I asked to assess the victim. At first, the ICE agents wouldn’t let me through … none of the ICE agents who were near the victim were performing CPR.” Instead, “the ICE agents appeared to be counting his bullet wounds.” Finally, the doctor was allowed to approach the body and found no pulse. His affidavit ends: “I worry that I or someone I love will be shot and killed for voicing their displeasure and being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

If Stephen Miller represents Trump’s unrestrained cruelty, Greg Bovino has represented Stephen Miller’s. After the uproar, Bovino was at last removed from Minneapolis. It was reported he would leave his role as commander-at-large. But he was only following orders. Bovino is the fall guy with a story to tell if and when there is a Congress that wants to hear it.

Bovino had been dispatched from city to city in charge of ICE operations, ostensibly to round up “the worst of the worst” of criminal illegal aliens. In truth, it seems he was tasked with what Hannah Arendt calls “artificial creation of civil war conditions”, in The Origins of Totalitarianism. “For the movement, organized violence is the most efficient of the many protective walls which surround its fictitious world,” she wrote “is as important to the integrity of the fictitious world of the organization as the fear of its terror.”

To that end, Bovino had cultivated his image for propaganda purposes just as carefully as former beauty queen Kristi Noem adjusts her outfits. He has been highly conscious of how he presented himself as a paramilitary fashion plate for what he calls his “turn and burn” raids. Bovino is the only one on an ICE raid who does not mask his face, so that he is the only personification of Trump’s brutal tactics. He poses in his photo on his Twitter/X in tactical gear holding an M4 rifle with a telescopic sight. He throws teargas canisters at protesters in front of the cameras. He is rather short, about 5ft 4in tall, with a fade crewcut spiked with hair gel. He wears a full-length dark military coat with bulky square shoulders, a high collar and decorated with military-like patches to attempt to project an intimidating presence.

Governor Gavin Newsom needled him as “dressed up literally as if he went on eBay and purchased SS garb” and called him “Gestapo Greg”. Bovino took the bait, attempting to turn Newsom’s barb into a macho competition, replying that Newsom had “coat envy”. That gave Newsom the opportunity for another round to ridicule Bovino, “too small for me, munchkin,” adding: “Oh, and I’m not a wanna-be Nazi.”

When Bovino launched Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago last September, he flamboyantly marched through downtown, rode armed in a boat down the Chicago River and freely told a reporter that he ordered ICE agents to arrest people based on “how they look”. Bovino elaborated to the reporter, who was white: “How do they look compared to, say, you? What’s your name again?” “Chip,” replied the journalist. “Chip? Hey, Chip, you or other folks,” Bovino explained. “How do they appear in relation to what you or other people look like?”

Bovino claimed he was hit by a rock thrown by a protester, which forced him to use teargas without warning in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago with a large Mexican immigrant population during a children’s Halloween parade. “If I had more CS gas, I would have deployed it,” he said. He admitted later in a deposition that he had been “confused” and “mixed up” in his contradictory testimony about violence against ICE. On 7 November 2025, US district court judge in Illinois, Sara Ellis, said that Bovino was “evasive” and “outright lying” in his testimony and issued an additional injunction limiting ICE’s use of force. She also ordered him to wear a body camera.

Jenn Budd, a former border patrol senior agent, described Bovino as “the Liberace of the Border Patrol” in a profile of him in the Chicago Sun-Times. “He’s just a little Napoleon who wants you to think that he is a hero and the most moral and capable guy in the world, and everything around you is dangerous. But he’s the one who’s going to save you. It’s all a show for him.”

As part of Operation Midway Blitz, the US attorney’s office brought 31 non-immigration criminal cases to court. To date, there have been zero convictions.

When Bovino moved his show from Chicago to New Orleans last December for what he billed as Operation Catahoula Crunch, he boasted on X: “The Big Easy is the Big Hard for illegal aliens.” Then a local reporter zoomed in on his video camera to capture the text messages he was sending on his phone. “Kind of cool we are a massive wrecking crew. The idiots can’t do anything to us … I can’t understand why DHS is hiding us when we are handing them strategy on a silver platter,” Bovino wrote to someone called “Diz”.

Unfortunately, Bovino’s agents made only 38 arrests during their much publicized first four days in New Orleans. Only nine had criminal records. “Diz” worried in a text to Bovino that he needed to spin his image to cover for the meager results. “You need to do interviews. Fox and friends wants you. We will come up for a talking point on the low numbers.” Bovino had frequently used Fox News and its digital platforms as his bulletin board.

The “low numbers”, however, remained a persistent problem through the end of 2025. Of the people detained by ICE, only 5% had violent convictions, fewer than the 6% with traffic tickets, and 73% with no criminal convictions at all, according to the Cato Institute. “In its posts on this subject, DHS and ICE often include people with pending criminal charges as ‘criminal arrests,’ even though these people have never been found guilty, and the charges are often minor and regularly dismissed. ICE is depriving these people of due process by arresting them prior to a conviction.”

After New Orleans, Bovino moved on to Minneapolis, which he labeled Operation Metro Surge. By the day of the lethal shooting of Alex Pretti, ICE and the border patrol had deployed more than 3,000 agents. Bovino went on TV to retail the story that Pretti was about to “massacre law enforcement.” “So good job for our law enforcement in taking him down before he was able to do that,” he said.

During the day Pretti was killed, Trump blamed “Democrat ensued chaos”, accused Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey of “inciting insurrection” and posted a picture of Pretti’s handgun claiming it was “loaded ... and ready to go”. Trump had previously blamed Renee Nicole Good for her own killing – “a professional agitator”.

Within hours of Pretti’s killing, attorney general Pam Bondi, undoubtedly at Trump’s instigation, sent a letter to Walz accusing him of fostering “lawlessness”, and demanding he turn over to the Trump administration “all of Minnesota’s records on Medicaid and Food and Nutrition Service Program”, repeal the state’s sanctuary policies, and deliver to the justice department the state’s voter rolls. The last demand reflected a longstanding rightwing conspiracy theory that Democrats win elections through voter fraud and specifically a corollary of Trump’s Big Lie, his false claim that he won Minnesota in 2016, 2020 and 2024, when in fact he had lost. Getting control of the voter rolls would open the door to vote tampering in the midterm elections of 2026.

The night that Pretti was killed, his body lying in a morgue, a gala event was staged at the White House – a private premiere of Melania, a “documentary” before its public debut the next week at the newly renamed Donald J Trump Kennedy Center. Melania could not be shown in the White House screening room, which Trump had torn down along with the rest of the East Wing. A special pop-up theater was built within the White House with a giant screen just for the occasion.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon provided $40m to produce Melania, a pittance in tribute to receive munificent contracts and dispensations. His space company, Blue Origin, received a $2.3bn contract in April, and retains a $3.4bn Nasa lunar lander contract. Amazon has kicked in $1m for Trump’s grandiose ballroom. To promote Melania, Amazon will spend $35m in advertising, according to a report in Puck. Already, an image of Melania has been projected on The Sphere in Las Vegas.

Melania Trump hand-picked Brett Ratner as the director of Melania, marking his comeback after six women in Hollywood, including the actor Olivia Munn, accused the director and producer of sexual harassment and misconduct in 2017. (No charges were filed and he has strenuously denied all the accusations.)

As the guests arrived the Marine Corps Band played Melania’s Waltz, from the film. There was, among them, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, Queen Raina of Jordan, and Erika Kirk; Amazon execs Mike Hopkins and Andy Jassy; Zoom CEO Eric Yuan and New York Stock Exchange CEO Lynn Martin, and Mike Tyson. Each guest was given gifts of a limited-edition popcorn box and a framed ticket of the event.

Not a word about the day’s killing was mentioned to disturb the joyous festivities. That night, Melania enabled the Trump White House to grace Bovino’s style of violence with the glamor of indifference. The spirit of the evening had been captured by the slogan that appeared on the back of the jacket that Melania wore in 2018 to a Texas detention center that housed children separated from their immigrant parents under a Trump policy: “I really don’t care, do u?”

• Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist