Confronted with a political backlash after federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, Donald Trump told Fox News earlier this week that he wanted to “de-escalate a little bit.”
For those who believed that the president was sincere, I have some bad news.
Days after the White House tried to put some distance between Trump and his administration’s smear campaign against the shooting victim, the president has abandoned the pretense.
This was evident Wednesday night when he amplified an online message that described Pretti as a “domestic terrorist,” and it was reinforced roughly 24 hours later when Trump renewed his offensive against the late intensive care nurse. The New York Times reported:
President Trump called Alex Pretti, the nurse who was one of two Americans fatally shot by federal agents in Minneapolis this month, an ‘agitator’ and possibly an ‘insurrectionist’ in a social media post early Friday, repeating efforts by his administration to blame the victims of the shootings.
The same online item said the victim’s “stock has gone way down.”
The Republican was referring to footage that emerged this week that showed a separate confrontation between Pretti and federal agents that occurred 11 days before he was killed. The video shows the Minnesota nurse in a tense run-in with different federal agents in which he kicked the taillight of one of their SUVs.
It also showed agents exiting their vehicle, grabbing Pretti and shoving him to the ground as other officers fire tear gas and pepper balls into a nearby crowd.
Perhaps someone will discover a Pretti relative who votes Republican, which might encourage Trump to adopt a new tone, but in the meantime, any suggestion that the White House is trying to reduce tensions increasingly defies credibility. On Wednesday morning, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared on CNBC and boasted about the president having “brought down the temperature on the situation.” Within a day and a half, Trump was using his social media platform to characterize Pretti again as a “domestic terrorist” and possibly an “insurrectionist.”
Notably, at a Kennedy Center event on Thursday night, the president told reporters, “We have to take criminals out of our country, so from that standpoint, nothing’s gonna change.”
When a reporter asked, “So you’re not pulling back [in Minnesota]?” Trump replied, “No, no, not at all.”
The “de-escalation” phase is apparently over, if it ever existed in a meaningful way in the first place.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
