Shooting An Elephant: Little Rascals Edition

The leaders of the MAGA cult, looking at every video of an ICE shooting in Minneapolis, insist that they see, and therefore that you must also see, an honorable law enforcement officer being rammed by a car driven by a domestic terrorist and therefore fully justified in defending himself with lethal force against this act of extremist violence. The cult submits its perceptual faculty and logical capacity (such as it is) to the meatgrinder of “Trust Trump” propaganda because they must do so in order to keep what little is left of their rapidly disintegrating world intact. Meanwhile the rest of the world, looking at the very same videos, sees a masked thug shooting a nervous female protester in the face three times when she clearly posed no threat, and then angrily calling his victim a “f—ing b—-” as she dies.

What we have here, on its face, is a simple case of quasi-religious fanatics accepting the dictates of blind faith over the plain evidence of their own eyes, while everyone else stares in somewhat horrified awe at the mind-altering power of spiritual submission. The question remains, however: Why would the MAGA cult’s idol and his lieutenants impose this reality-defying demand on their millions of munchkins in the first place? For what purpose?

It is tempting to answer, “Because they are continually testing the limits of the loyalty and intellectual genuflection they may expect from their slavish followers.” This explanation is certainly plausible. We all remember Donald Trump’s proud claim, in the run-up to the 2016 Republican caucus in Iowa, that he would not lose his followers if he shot a man on Fifth Avenue. Surely some part of the reasoning for all of this second Trump term’s domestic agitations, from using National Guard troops as an urban intimidation force without portfolio to sending his masked ICE army into middle class neighborhoods and stores to stir up anger and fear, is simply the intention to prove that Trump’s followers are now so permanently embedded in his lunacy that they would not leave him if he shot a man, or even a woman, on every middle class avenue in America.

Yet, while I do believe this first explanation has some validity to it, I am inclined to think something more primal, and therefore less calculated, is also at work, something essential to understanding the nexus of false bravado and real cowardice that drives any authoritarian movement in its downhill phase, as it seeks to maintain control over the forces of irrational violence it has deliberately unleashed. This primal motivation is the demagogue’s desperate need to keep feeding his wild dogs lest they turn their rage against him. Specifically, the Trump administration has rapidly rebuilt ICE, formerly a non-partisan immigration enforcement agency, into the MAGA Militia, a militarized national police force dedicated ideologically and emotionally to the precise agenda of the Trump administration, and most of whose members have evidently received less formal law enforcement training than they have received full-course MAGA indoctrination. That is to say, these men are less like professional police officers than like angry Trump voters hyped up on Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon baloney to believe that everyone who opposes the Trump administration in any way is a traitor to America, a leftist radical funded by George Soros, and a “Trump-deranged” subversive who in a perfect world would simply be exiled or executed for disloyalty to the MAGA god.

Within the first months of his new presidential term, Trump and his elected sycophants aggressively set about recruiting a massive new contingent of ICE agents, providing the organization with unprecedented levels of funding and unprecedentedly wide-ranging authority and mission statements — thus, by the way, realizing through the back door the nationalization of the police that millions of Trump’s Republican supporters, back when they pretended to be “the Tea Party movement,” feared and warned against as a dire threat to federalism and civil society, and yet now cheer and admire for exactly the same reason. Given the incendiary anti-immigrant rhetoric tied to this recruitment project, and the fact that its spearhead and leading pitchman was Donald Trump himself, it is easy to see what kind of men would have been attracted by the agency’s new advertising campaign, not just in terms of old-fashioned partisan affiliation, but in terms of personality cult devotion to the person and platform of Trump himself, and especially to that side of his agenda that is primarily voiced by the likes of Stephen Miller and Nick Fuentes, the Saving-White-America-From-the-Dirty-Lazy-Marxist-Foreigners crowd. These new ICE officers would be paranoid men fearing a commie under every bed. Men who talk a lot about — and listen a lot to others talking about — the need for a new civil war to revive American greatness by cleansing the country of its woke-leftist-homosexual extremists. Men who pretend to “faith and family” but spend more time on neighbor-hating than god-fearing, and more energy obsessing over alt-right podcasts and radio programs than loving a wife and children. Men who actually believe the biggest lie in American political history, namely that the path to American greatness runs through the withered irrationality of Trump’s greed-, vanity-, and lust-rotted brain — and believe, too, the second-biggest lie in American political history, namely that the 2020 election was stolen from their unbeatable hero by massive (but somehow undetectable) voter fraud.

In short, whatever the agency once was, the ICE of early 2026 is, and undoubtedly sees itself primarily as, an arm, not of the federal government, nor of the executive branch of that government as a constitutional entity, but of the MAGA movement alone, a notably anti-constitutional and anti-federalist political tribe that is utterly identifiable with and inseparable from the frightened and fear-mongering megalomania of one infamously mendacious fool. ICE in its current form — over-manned but under-trained, masked and unidentifiable like the secret police in any authoritarian state, heads filled with marching orders contrary to the norms of restraint and de-escalation typical of professional law enforcement agencies in times of social tension, and explicitly propagandized from the top of the pyramid to treat all opposition to their presence as terrorism and all protest against their methods as a violent threat — resembles nothing so much as a grown-up, radicalized, fully-armed iteration of “The He-Man Woman-Haters Club” from Our Gang. But there is no Alfalfa in this older and angrier version of the club to question the boys’ mission statement, because such a doubter would never have asked to join in the first place, or made it through the rigorous indoctrination process even if he had.

From this understanding of ICE’s ideological makeover, and its extreme recalibration as a blunt force weapon of social intimidation and compliance answerable only to Donald Trump and his most radically authoritarian advisors, a special concern arises, a concern that has become surprisingly apparent in recent months, such as in the very public splintering of MAGA embodied by Marjorie Taylor Greene. The concern is that, having riled one’s followers up to the kind of resolute blind fury that is required to make them employable as the critical mass of a revolutionary upheaval in American society, it becomes essential to the cause that, (a) these angry militants feel perfectly certain that their leaders will have their backs through all the escalations and instigations that they are being asked to engage in, lest they weaken under the fear of legal punishment for their thuggery, and (b) they never experience a moment’s reflective doubt about whether their leaders are absolutely sincere and steadfast in their own support for the mission.

In short, these ignoble dogs, trained up to a violent hatred toward the unbelievers and traitors (citizen and non-citizen alike), can only be held, and further fomented, in this dangerous condition of obedient lawlessness, by leash holders prepared to present a public face of perfect and unwavering support for everything they ever do, no matter how terrible, as long as it is done while serving the movement. For their leaders to evince even a quiet note of even-handedness at a moment such as this — a hint of sympathy for the victim of the shooting for example, or even, heaven forbid, a refusal to rush to judgment against the victim before a full investigation has been conducted — would send a chill through this entire MAGA Militia, shattering in an instant their blind faith, with indications that their owners are willing, at least in theory, to consider their victims as innocent until proven guilty, and hence themselves, the ignoble dogs of ICE, as potentially being guilty of crimes. (Consider in this context J. D. Vance’s insistence that ICE is “protected by absolute immunity” in all their actions.) That would be the beginning of the end of the Trump secret police force, leading to mass resignations or worse, as these ideological warriors would come to view their own leaders, MTG style, as backstabbers, traitors to the cause.

So the whole administration, from Trump to J. D. Vance to Kristi Noem, along with its public rabble-rousers from Bannon to Megan Kelly and the rest, leapt to the microphones, from the earliest moments of this Minneapolis shooting becoming public news, to denounce the victim and exonerate the shooter, to brazenly falsify the visible facts of the smartphone videos from the event, including and most grotesquely the video shot by the killer himself — in which he switches his phone to his left hand in order to draw his weapon without cause, and then proceeds to shoot an unarmed woman three times in the face when he was clearly positioned outside of any risk of physical harm — and to say, as Trump himself said days after the event, that killing this non-violent protester was justified because:

The woman and her friend were highly disrespectful of law enforcement…. Law enforcement should not be in a position where they have to put up with this stuff.

In other words, protesters against the prairie fire tactics of Trump’s armed minions deserve to be killed, freedom of speech and assembly be damned.

The only consolation upon hearing the “most powerful man in the world” (and also at this moment likely the world’s most fear-driven coward) tell his boys that they have carte blanche to kill anyone who dares to criticize or “disrespect” them — that he will have their backs — is the consideration that the main reason he is saying such things, and feels compelled to say them, is that he knows he has created a bloodthirsty monster, and that he must now appease and mollify that monster continually or risk becoming its next prey.

For a more civilized rendition of this tale of the psychology of domination, I recommend Orwell’s wonderful essay, “Shooting An Elephant.”

And for a demonstration of what a real law enforcement officer thinks about the proper relationship between police and community, and the moral obligations of a man with a badge and the authority to use lethal force, I recommend a new interview with the Chief of the Minneapolis Police Department. (The New York Times interviewer is smug and arrogant as one might expect, but cutting through his manure is more than worth the effort for the sake of hearing what a responsible police officer sounds like.)