The killing of Alex Pretti was unjust and unjustified. While protesting — aka “observing” or “interfering with” — deportation operations, the VA hospital ICU nurse came to the aid of two protesters, one of whom had been slammed to the ground by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent. With a phone in one hand, Pretti used the other hand, in vain, to protect his eyes while being pepper sprayed. Knocked to the ground, Pretti was repeatedly smashed in the face with the spray can, pummeled by multiple agents, disarmed of his holstered legal firearm and then shot nine or 10 times.
Note the sequence. He was disarmed and then he was shot.
That’s why the killing is undeniably unjust and unjustified. Unjust because Pretti didn’t deserve to die, even if he’d been fully “obstructing” federal agents, death is not a just price for that. But he wasn’t obstructing an agent from deporting an immigrant. He was obstructing an agent from further assaulting a woman in the street.
The killing was unjustified because a gang of agents didn’t need to shoot Pretti after they disarmed him. If you want to argue that merely bringing a gun to any protest justifies being shot by law enforcement, even after being disarmed, you’re going to sound as politically dumb, hypocritical or authoritarian as a whole bunch of administration officials and GOP defenders undeniably did over the weekend.
I keep using that word — “undeniable.” Sadly, it really doesn’t mean what it used to mean. “Undeniable” describes something that is so obviously and clearly true that no one can refute or dispute it. With this administration, truth ain’t got nothing to do with anything.
In the immediate aftermath of Pretti’s killing, members of the Trump administration took to TV and social media to describe Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” and an “assassin.” The head of CBP, Gregory Bovino, said, “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem echoed the same talking points. Pretti’s motive, she claimed, was “to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement” because he was a “domestic terrorist.” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller asserted that Pretti was an “assassin” who tried to “murder federal agents.”
The administration is making all of this up. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they are lying. They just don’t care what the truth is.
In his seminal book “On Bulls—” (the actual title isn’t censored), philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt argues that lying implies a certain respect for, and knowledge of, the truth. “It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bulls— requires no such conviction.” What this administration does is worse than lying because they don’t care whether something is true or false, only whether it will be believed.
The Trump White House is a bulls— distribution hub, that connects via tubes, canals and sluices across the media landscape. Like some vast Rube Goldberg contraption, the guy on the giant hamster wheel powering the whole thing is a president who spent his life saying whatever he needed to say at any given moment to make a deal, get out of trouble, whatever.
Raised on “the power of positive thinking” and the prosperity gospel, Donald J. Trump has always believed he could conjure the reality he wants through sheer will and a relentless repetition of what he wants people to believe. He makes claims about what “they” are “saying” and recounts tales about what people have told him, some of which are surely made up while others are probably true but insincerely told, given that everyone knows the president believes all flattery he hears.
Trump sprayed bovine excrement throughout his first term, too. But he also had staff with hazmat suits, containment and cleanup gear at the ready.
Now, in his second term, everyone grabs a hose — but that’s not water in those tanks. Terminally online and obsessed with cable news narratives, this White House is full of people who have learned at the (kissed) feet of the master. The truth and lies are just different kinds of tools for the job that matters: constructing a narrative the president wants to hear, mostly about himself or for his benefit.
That’s why the administration’s Sunday show spinners are so bad at the job. The mission isn’t primarily to reassure, never mind to inform, the public, but to reassure the president that the public is being properly told how great the president is. Because they know he’s watching.
Trump is reportedly “reviewing” the policies that left Pretti dead in the street. That’s good. But Trump’s motive isn’t to prevent more needless deaths, just the needless deaths that don’t make him look good.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.