First Draft: Murder Inc.
Trump's DHS escalates its reign of terror and killings, pro-gun groups are pissed at Republicans, and the 'Middle East's only democracy' cracks down on the free press... again.
On this day in 1998, President Bill Clinton took to TV to deny the allegations that he had an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, making the now infamous statement, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”
Good morning. It’s Swin (or, Asawin Suebsaeng) filling in for Mehdi again. I was going to start off with a fun little game or quirky intro, as I usually do when I sub in for ‘First Draft,’ but there is way too much state-sponsored murder and brutalizing of everyday Americans going on right now, so let’s dive in.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ ICE doubles down on its lawless crusade even as it loses public support, Trump cronies snub pro-gun allies in their feeble defense of Alex Pretti’s killer, Elon Musk’s abusive AI chatbot prompts bipartisan opposition, and Israel extends its ban on Al Jazeera.
They Think They Have a Right to Kill You and Laugh About It
There are other repressive governments and rancid ideologies that you could reasonably compare to Donald Trump’s GOP and the Trump-Vance administration, but in my decade-plus covering MAGA conservatism, I’ve found that, by far, this government and its movement’s closest ideological cousin is simply a violently abusive husband. You beg them to stop, even for a moment, and they’ll use that as an excuse to continue the beatings. If you fight back, they’ll sneer and spit at you and shout that you asked for it. And if you try to hold them accountable, they will play the victim in the most annoying, obscene, and pathetically disingenuous ways imaginable.
And on the other side of the aisle, you have a noodle-limbed opposition that, for all its many severe problems, isn’t the ruling party.
The abusive, hideously violent nature of the people in charge – Donald Trump, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Greg Bovino, Mike Johnson, all of them – was once again exhibited over the weekend, when Trump’s Department of Homeland Security and its secret police force summarily executed yet another civilian, a nurse named Alex Pretti, during the Trump administration’s militarized, openly racist siege of Minneapolis.
It seems Pretti’s dying words were to ask if a nearby woman – another enemy of the state, according to Team Trump – was OK, in the face of Trump’s trigger-happy federal cops. He said this moments before the Trump administration decided to pump several rounds into his body.
Trump’s invasion of Minnesota has been brutal throughout, and this is merely the latest killing in an occupation that is being backstopped by the president’s repeated threats to invoke the Insurrection Act and send in the military. The administration’s Minnesota offensive is today the most important battleground in the MAGA Republican Party’s broader efforts to eviscerate many of the legal and civil rights that made modern America an appealing destination, such as the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, and the freedom from lethal state terror and a tyrant’s unchecked, arbitrary power.
Trump and his lieutenants are working to codify a new, more sinister right, one that they reserve selfishly for just themselves and their pals: the right to murder other people’s loved ones with impunity – in broad daylight, on camera – and to then immediately have a good laugh about it.