The Trump administration can’t stop winking at white nationalists |
Progressives have long argued that Donald Trump’s immigration agenda is a fundamentally fascistic enterprise. In their telling, the president’s goal is not merely to enforce America’s borders but to purify its blood — and unleash state violence against anyone who resists his campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Key takeaways
Trump defended an ICE agent who killed an unarmed protester; most Americans disapprove of that shooting. Federal agencies keep posting thinly veiled allusions to white nationalist and neo-Nazi works and ideas. The administration appears to be prioritizing approval from extremely online reactionaries over mainstream public opinion.Of course, there’s nothing new about the left deriding Republicans as fascists (in 2008, Keith Olbermann advised George W. Bush, “get them to print you a T-shirt with ‘fascist’ on it.”). Traditionally, however, GOP officials have sought to combat that charge.
Yet in recent days, the Trump administration has gone out of its way to validate it — rallying to the defense of an ICE agent who shot an unarmed woman dead on video, while disseminating white nationalist propaganda from official government accounts.
As communications strategies go, this one is a bit odd. Even if the Trump administration were indeed a fascist regime, it would have little political incentive to advertise its own extremism. America’s electorate is not demanding apologetics for ICE brutality or thinly disguised calls for racial purification.
But Trump’s most radicalized followers on X and Truth Social are. And the US government is evidently more concerned with winning the latter’s approval than the former’s.
Trump’s politically mindless defense of Renee Nicole Good’s killer
Last week in Minneapolis, an ICE agent shot 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good to death. By now, you have probably witnessed her final moments; videos of the encounter quickly became ubiquitous on social media.
In them, the masked agent — later identified as Jonathan Ross — steps in front of Good’s car while another demands that she exit her vehicle. Good, an anti-ICE protester, responds by trying to drive away.
In doing so, she passes close by Ross, possibly bumping him (although he displays no sign of injury in subsequent footage). The ICE officer proceeds to shoot at her three times — twice, when he is standing to the car’s left and therefore faces no conceivable threat from her. He then calls her a “fucking bitch.”
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