“We the People.” The first three words of the U.S. Constitution. They tell us that the power of the government originates with its citizens.
“In order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” the Preamble continues.
It is the defining ethos of a democracy.
There is an unsaid but explicit understanding that we the people must trust in the government, just as we believe in the Constitution.
With a flurry of gunshots on a freezing Saturday morning, that trust was broken.
The whole country saw it. In Hitler’s Germany, there was no such evidence. The Germans believed what they were told, and they paid an enormous price.
We saw with our own eyes how Alex Pretti died. Buried under a pile of bodies of masked men. Pinned down. Killed in cold blood.
We know that Pretti was not a “domestic terrorist,” as he was slandered by President Donald Trump, Deputy White House Chief-of-Staff Stephen Miller, and Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.
He was a U.S. citizen, an ICU nurse working for our veterans, carrying out his absolute right to protest in the streets of his city.
He did not have a criminal record, and it’s an insult to his family and to his memory to suggest he was out to assassinate anyone. There is no shred of evidence to suggest this.
It is the worst kind of disinformation.
We have a state where the governor, the mayor and the police chief are begging the federal government to get the f—- out.
In turn, Trump and the administration stand by their ICE goons in the face of all the facts and attack Minnesota’s leaders.
This is Civil War.
We can only hope that the president sees sense and reins in his thugs before the violence spreads to other cities in other states.
But the signs are not good.
Whatever your politics, there has always been an implicit trust in the president. It is why we were so shocked and appalled at the behavior of Richard Nixon in using burglary and deception to keep tabs on his detractors. It’s why we struggled to forgive Bill Clinton for lying about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. We worry Joe Biden kept his steep cognitive decline hidden from us.
But these infractions, as serious as they were, are nothing compared to the duplicity of the Trump administration.
They run on the simple strategy that if you tell a lie loudly and often enough, people will believe it.
We must hope that Minnesota is not a microcosm of what we can expect in the rest of America. The sight of armed masked men roaming our streets is sinister and all the more so because there appears to be absolutely no oversight or constraints on their behavior.
There have been three killings in Minneapolis this year. Two of them were by ICE agents.
Timothy McVeigh was a domestic terrorist. He killed 168 people when he bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. Patrick Wood Crusius was a domestic terrorist. He shot dead 25 people in an El Paso, Texas Walmart on August 19, 2019.
There are others.
Alex Pretti wasn’t a terrorist. Nor was Renee Good, the 37-year-old mother of three, gunned down in her car by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on January 7.
We the people aren’t stupid. Nor are we blind.
The president needs to come to his senses and end this madness before a polarized country, divided by ideology, becomes a nation at war with itself.
