By this point, you’ve probably seen the videos — or at least heard about what’s in them. They show a man named Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse who is filming ICE activity in Minneapolis, intervening when federal agents assault a woman. In response, the agents grab Pretti, force him to the ground, beat him, and ultimately shoot the defenseless man repeatedly. Pretti was pronounced dead on the scene.
The footage of Pretti’s killing, shot from different angles by different bystanders, looks disturbingly similar to scenes in places like Syria and Iran — where people rising up against authoritarian regimes were silenced by baton and bullet. The resonance is especially chilling given the Trump administration’s response.
In a well-functioning liberal democracy, acts of official brutality against citizens are taken seriously by public officials. Yet the Trump administration responded almost immediately by smearing Pretti and lionizing his killer. In its statement on the incident, the Department of Homeland Security claimed that Pretti was armed and was “violently resisting” arrest — that the officer who killed the man “fired defensive shots.” Stephen Miller called Pretti “a domestic terrorist [who] tried to assassinate federal law enforcement.”
These are verifiable lies — the same kind of lies deployed against Renee Good when she too was killed by federal agents. While Pretti was indeed armed, carrying a gun openly is legal in Minnesota, and he had a permit to do so. At the beginning of the incident, he is holding a cell phone; at no point does he draw his gun. In fact, independent analysis of the footage confirmed that federal agents had secured Pretti’s gun before firing on him.
So it’s not only that federal agents kill an American citizen like authoritarian thugs, but their superiors in Washington justified that killing with the kind of bald-faced lie that recalls Tehran and Moscow.
These resonances suggest America is at a grim tipping point. The Trump administration’s actions augur an increasingly violent crackdown, one in which they attempt to secure power less by legal manipulation than by application of brutal force.
Such a violent approach is unlikely to succeed in a country like the United States: Our domestic security forces are not equipped for the level of extreme brutality necessary to make it work in the face of growing public outrage.
But how Trump responds to the democratic outpouring in the streets of Minnesota, and the growing unease among even some in his party, will determine just how dark and brutal the next few months will be.
Two kinds of authoritarianism
There are two broad routes to turning a previously democratic society into an authoritarian one.
One is subtle and mostly lawful: The executive accrues increasing levels of power through legal shenanigans, and deploys it to make elections become less and less fair over time. The other is brutally overt: bald suspensions of political rights and civil liberties paired with brutal repression of dissenters and disfavored groups. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is an archetypal example of the first; Stalin’s Soviet Union a classic case of the second.
The first strategy depends on subtlety, hiding its authoritarian policies behind legal veneers that hide their true nature in order to avoid widespread citizen outrage. The second depends on being brutally, nakedly violent — making a bloody example out of dissenters to show anyone who challenges the state risks the same fate.
These two logics are obviously in tension: It’s a lot harder to successfully hide authoritarian intent from most people when your security services are engaging in overt violence. Yet the second Trump administration has attempted both strategies at once. Sometimes, they employ tactics like a nationwide gerrymandering push that fit squarely in the Orbánist playbook; sometimes, they abduct lawful residents and send them to be tortured in El Salvador.
Saturday’s developments — and the Minneapolis crackdown more broadly — mark a potentially decisive move in the latter direction.
It is now undeniable that this kind of violence is the direct consequence of sending a paramilitary force to occupy an unwilling city. If the Trump administration wished to avoid the appearance of democratic crisis, they would both change their policy and pursue real accountability for the agents involved.
Pulling back ICE and conducting a real investigation into Pretti’s killing would be the more strategic approach if they wished to go the Orbánist route: It would help them maintain the democratic veneer that is so vital to legitimizing subtle power grabs.
But the immediate defense by administration figures of the immigration officers involved in the shooting, without even a credible pretense of mobilizing government resources to conduct an impartial investigation, clearly suggests a doubling down on brazen repression.
In such a context, Stephen Miller’s recent comments on global politics — that the “iron laws” of the world mean it is one “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power” — take on a sinisterly domestic cast.
An authoritarian America, both bloody and brittle
The Trump administration’s most effective moves to consolidate power, like using regulatory power to help the billionaire Ellison family control a growing chunk of the American media, have all followed in Orbán’s footsteps. By contrast, the thuggish ICE deployments have done little to repress dissent — and much to inflame public sentiment against the government.
This is true in Minnesota, obviously, but also in Los Angeles, Chicago, DC, and other major cities. In each case, an organizational infrastructure has emerged to oppose the crackdown that didn’t exist a year ago. And these activists were winning even prior to Saturday: Trump’s poll numbers are plummeting, including on his formerly strong issue of immigration.
Saturday’s events are all but certain to accelerate this dynamic.
We’ve already seen Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, called the killing “incredibly disturbing” and demanded a “full joint federal and state investigation.” Gun rights activists are criticizing attempts to blame Pretti’s weapon for his killing. And these are just the cracks inside the ruling coalition; Democrats are on the brink of shutting down the government over ICE killings, and we’ve yet to see what response nonviolent activists from across the counry put together.
Controlling this level of public resistance by force is unthinkable in the United States. Evidence from history shows that, once mobilized, mass publics don’t retreat in the face of isolated incidents of violence. It takes overwhelming amounts of force — something akin to the recent crackdown in Iran, where state security forces killed thousands of protestors in the street to subdue a mass uprising. Barring such butchery, which is difficult even for some hardened authoritarian regimes to pull off, the Trump administration will not be able to force restive Americans to accept their rule.
But their attempts to impose their will by force, however haphazard, already has a body count of at least two in Minneapolis. If they double down on unrestrained ICE occupations of cities, refusing to give an inch in the face of nonviolent public defiance, this kind of scene will play out again and again.
“Extrajudicial killings are not the sign of a strong regime,” the political scientist Paul Musgrave writes. “But they may be the portent of a bloody one.”
This is what we in America now have to prepare for: a hostile government that has lost patience with establishing sufficient control by more subtle means and is now increasingly turning to violent ones.
