A newspaper owned by arch-conservative Rupert Murdoch has called on President Donald Trump to fire a member of his team over the shocking violence committed by immigration agents in Minnesota.
“Put a face on failure, and get rid of it,” the New York Post’s editorial board wrote Wednesday. “It may be unfair, it may mean telling a committed loyalist to walk the plank, but it’s a necessity.”
That “necessity” comes after the shock killings of protesters Alex Pretti last weekend by Border Patrol and of Renee Nicole Good earlier this month by ICE agents on the streets of Minneapolis.
“Trump doesn’t have to admit error, either,” the New York Post wrote. “But if he wants to keep winning after something’s clearly gone wrong in the public’s eye, he should send the message that his administration will do better.”
Pretti and Good’s deaths have sparked calls for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to be impeached amid massive public backlash.
It has also witnessed a monumental nosedive in the MAGA administration’s approval ratings, with a majority of Americans now saying that Trump’s deportation drive has gone too far and even that they’d like to see ICE abolished altogether.
The Department of Homeland Security has responded to Pretti’s death by moving Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol commander previously in charge of the Minnesota operation, out of the state.
Trump has since dispatched border czar Tom Homan, a key rival of Noem’s, to oversee what’s expected to prove a scaling-down of ICE activities in Minneapolis.
The New York Post’s editorial board did not go so far as to call for Noem’s sacking outright. They nevertheless made clear that a firing of Bovino’s level was unlikely to assuage increasingly disaffected voters.
“A high-level firing, even if not utterly explicit, is easily the best way to signal—to the public and to his whole team—that things are going to change,” they wrote.
“The White House needs to rapidly turn the corner on Minneapolis, and obvious efforts to just change the subject won’t reassure nervous swing voters,” the New York Post went on. “To move on, the prez should ax someone, get smart enforcement moving forward and then get to selling his big successes.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.
