The Trump administration has always treated truth as an inconvenience. Nearly a decade ago, Kellyanne Conway gave the country a phrase that instantly became shorthand for the administration’s worldview: “alternative facts.” She used it to defend false claims about the size of Donald Trump’s inauguration crowd, insisting that the White House was simply offering a different version of reality despite clear photographic evidence to the contrary.
That moment was a blueprint.
It signaled that this administration would not merely spin or shade the truth—it would replace it. And today, as the country reels from the killing of Renee Nicole Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis, we are watching the full evolution of that blueprint in action.
Just over two hours after Good was shot, the Department of Homeland Security—under Secretary Kristi Noem—issued a statement defending the agent and labeling Good a “domestic terrorist.” This was before any independent investigation, before the release of full footage, and before the public had any verified facts.
In a tense, nearly 20‑minute interview on CNN, Jake Tapper pressed Noem repeatedly on how she could justify such a definitive accusation so quickly. Noem doubled down, claiming DHS had “unpublished video evidence” and insisting, “We all saw what happened,” even though the available footage raised more questions than answers.
Ross’s own cell phone video captured him calling Good a “f***ing b****” moments after firing into her vehicle as it appeared to turn away. Whether he was struck by the car remains unclear. Yet the administration’s narrative was locked in place within hours.
This is not fact‑finding. This is fact‑dictating.
Conway’s “alternative facts” were widely mocked at the time, but they were also a warning. The phrase normalized the idea that truth is optional—something a government can curate, edit, or discard. It was an early form of political gaslighting, a strategy that critics noted was designed to control public discussion by blurring the line between fact and fiction.
That strategy has hardened into something more dangerous: a government willing to prejudge a dead woman within hours of her killing, while demanding patience and deference for the armed agent who shot her.
Noem’s insistence that Good’s death was “absolutely” what DHS claimed it to be—despite the absence of an independent investigation—shows how deeply the administration’s contempt for factual rigor has become embedded in its governing style.
When a government decides that truth is negotiable, accountability becomes impossible.
Labeling Good a “domestic terrorist” before investigators have even reconstructed the scene is not just reckless—it is a message. It tells federal agents that the administration will protect them before knowing what happened. It tells grieving families that their loved ones’ reputations are expendable. And it tells the public that the government’s version of events will always outrank the evidence.
This is the logical endpoint of “alternative facts”: a state that does not wait for the truth because it does not need the truth.
Why This Moment Matters
The protests erupting across the country are not only about the shooting itself. They are about a government that has abandoned the basic democratic expectation that facts come before conclusions. They are about a pattern that began with something as seemingly trivial as lying about crowd size and has now escalated into preemptively criminalizing a dead woman to justify a shooting.
The Trump administration has spent years eroding the public’s ability to trust what it sees, hears, and knows. Conway gave the country the vocabulary. Noem is giving it the consequences.
A democracy cannot function when its leaders treat truth as a political tool. And the American public should not accept a government that decides guilt or innocence before the facts are known—especially when a life has been taken.
If the Trump administration wants to restore trust, it must start with something radical: telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But that would require abandoning the very strategy that has defined it from the beginning.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum and the publisher of the Latino News Network
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.