I’ve seen some comments that whatever the hideousness of it, President Trump’s and the GOP’s insistent defense of Minneapolis shooting is actually good politics — the thinking being that it pulls the public conversation away from Jeff Epstein and the cost of living and refocuses it on to protestors and blue cities, things that feel like they’re in the GOP’s comfort zone. I don’t buy this. It is in their comfort zone. But comfort zones don’t equal good politics.
Reason One
The most important reason I don’t buy this is that ICE and the whole mass deportation campaign is already really unpopular. There’s no poll that doesn’t show this. ICE and CBP’s spectacle of performative cruelty, frequently publicly visited on children, grandmothers, men involved in gainful employment whatever their immigration status, just hasn’t been popular. Everybody has seen a lot of it in the media and most Americans don’t like it. Given the general unpopularity of ICE and its tactics I don’t buy that it’s good politics to reflexively defend an agent shooting in the face and killing a 30-something white woman as she sat in her car. I’d need to see some very convincing and sustained evidence to convince me of that because on its face it seems absurd. What seems more likely to me is that most Americans don’t like seeing people — usually people who don’t look like them — brutalized. When they start seeing U.S. citizens — and, let’s be frank, really harmless-seeming white women — shot in the face, I think people go from “I don’t like seeing people brutalized” to “fuck! That could happen to me!” Thought bubble two is much more politically salient and damaging than point one. So I simply don’t think this is good politics.
Reason Two
Sometimes people reason that you need to find the key message and repeat it over and over. That’s true. That’s good messaging. But sometimes someone gets shot in the face and the public refocuses for a bit. That’s okay. There are more than forty weeks before the 2026 midterm elections. The public will go back to thinking about affordability and Epstein. In fact, they’re probably thinking about it this week too. It is a particular kind of fear of your own shadow to think you need to control what the public is thinking and talking about every week and that if your political opponents do something really hideous and unpopular and then defend it they’ve somehow pulled one over on you. That’s not how it works.
Reason Three
The Summer of 2020 was a very specific historical moment, a kind of crescendo of racial justice politics which had been building since the middle of the past decade, turbocharged by the social disequilibrium and collective agitation of the whole country being mostly or entirely locked down for the previous three months. And there were moments of violence though they were of course vastly overstated in comparison to the protests’ generally peaceful character. With all that, President Trump went on to lose reelection fairly decisively. Yes, Trump thinks defending law enforcement in every case, and as aggressively as possible, is good politics. But that doesn’t mean it is.
