How the Murder of Good Changes the Stakes for Good ICE won’t melt, but traumatic events of this kind create their own force fields that bring change Jonathan Alter Jan 11 Kent State (John Filo 1970); Trayvon Martin (2012); George Floyd (2020) No one can predict how the murder of Renee Good will change this country. But there’s an encouraging history of change the aftermath of certain violent and tragic events, and a poor track record for governments that shoot their own people in the streets. Even when this story is pushed out of the headlines by some new outrage, we may look back on it as the moment when Donald Trump lost his grip. Of course, the ICE story will likely get worse before it gets better. With the help of bonuses of up to $50,000 for each new recruit, ICE has more than doubled in size to 22,000 officers and agents — a large, hastily-trained police force that will kill again. And that’s not even counting Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents wandering far from the border. On Thursday, a CBP agent shot two suspects in Portland when, he says, they tried to run him down in their car. So Jonathan Ross, the trigger-happy officer who shot Good three times in front of the whole world, has plenty of company out there. And plenty of backing from the top. “This is a guy who’s actually done a very, very important job for the United States of America,” J.D. Vance said on Friday, asking for prayers for Ross. “He’s been assaulted, he’s been attacked, he’s been injured because of it. He deserves a debt of gratitude.” Gratitude? We should be grateful that instead of showing restraint or shooting out the tires, Ross shot Good in the face, orphaning her six-year-old son? The White House’s Orwellian response marks a descent from Trump’s reaction to the 2020 killing of a man less than a mile from where Ross killed Good. “All Americans were rightly sickened and revolted by the brutal death of George Floyd,” Trump said then in a statement. “My administration is fully committed that, for George and his family, justice will be served.” We have almost forgotten that in America — in any decent society — we’ve respected various customs, manners, and legal principles in these situations for hundreds of years. Presidents, governors, and other leaders invariably express sympathy for the dead and promise an independent investigation. That’s the difference between old-style authorities and today’s self-styled authoritarians. So why am I hopeful that after tensions escalate for a time, we’ll get some accountability — if not for Good’s murder, then for Trump’s efforts to establish an American police state? I’m hopeful because traumatic events of this magnitude — witnessed by all — create their own force fields, and thus their own social and political energy. Force fields, as we know from science fiction, are especially good in helping societies play defense. Let’s look at three events with differing facts and context than the Good case but comparable possible consequences for the public debate: The Kent State shootings In 1970, after President Nixon invaded Cambodia, mass protests erupted across the country. At Kent State University, Ohio National Guardsmen, firing from 100 yards away, killed four students. John Filo (later my colleague at Newsweek) immortalized the moment with a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo. Many conservative Ohioans interviewed that day said they wished more protesters had been killed, and Nixon went on to a landslide reelection. But the deaths of the students, commemorated in a powerful protest song by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, intensified the debate over Vietnam. Less than two months after Kent State, the Senate passed the Cooper-Church Amendment, which launched a slow but steady process of re-establishing congressional authority by cutting off funding for the war in Southeast Asia. The Trayvon Martin Killing In 2012, Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old Black kid from Sanford, Florida, was walking to a convenience store to buy candy, clad in a hoodie. George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch coordinator for a gated community, shot and killed him. After a storm of publicity, Zimmerman was acquitted on grounds of self-defense with the help of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. The killing of Trayvon Martin led directly to the creation of Black Lives Matter, which now includes nearly 100 chapters across the country, and to new sensitivity to law enforcement’s treatment of young black men. The Murder of George Floyd In 2020, Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd after a store clerk reported that he had made a purchase using a counterfeit $20 bill. Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes while Floyd was handcuffed and lying face down in the street. He was later convicted of murder. In the aftermath of Floyd’s death, huge peaceful demonstrations (amid COVID) led to new laws on police conduct in 30 states. The Renee Good case will have its own dynamic. In the short term, the FBI is already pushing Minnesota investigators aside and there’s not much that local law enforcement can do about it. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey telling ICE to “stay the fuck out of my city” isn’t likely to bring results. But neither will Trump’s pathetic, January 6th-style efforts to whitewash the truth. Thanks to careful analysis of the videotapes by the New York Times and others, we know that Trump and his top officials were telling one lie after another about the incident. Tom (“Cava Bag”) Homan, White House Border Czar, has promised a real investigation, and he should be held to that. It’s a good bet that the videotape of Ross trying to explain to investigators why he fired three times will be leaked, and that will kick off a whole new round of stories about ICE abuses. Melting ICE won’t be easy. There’s a noisy MAGA constituency for immigration control, and Democrats were burned in 2024 for moving too far left on the issue. Even if a new Democratic Congress slashes ICE funding, as it did in 2019 to spending on a border wall, Trump can re-purpose spending from other parts of the DHS budget. He has already moved funds from FEMA to ICE, and he can play those games again. But the murder of Good has changed the stakes for good. The optics for ICE will only get worse when this kind of criminal behavior is inevitably replicated in future encounters with immigrants and U.S. citizens. It will then become part of a pattern— a compelling ongoing story about a war at home that includes Trumpian atrocities against ordinary people. In the meantime, it’s nice to see Democrats stepping up. “She wasn’t a terrorist, she wasn’t a criminal, she was a mom,” Eric Swalwell said. “There’s no weapon in that glove compartment, no knife, no gun, no explosive. [Just] stuffed animals.” Rep. Yassamin Ansari, an inspiring freshman from Phoenix, excoriated the gaslighting of Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem: “This is what authoritarianism looks like. This is what happens when the leader of a nation turns a federal agency into his personal paramilitary force against the civilian population of the United States.” And this is what democracy looks like, too. Anyone on the left or right who believes that fearful Americans will now put their cell phones away when ICE shows up in their neighborhood is in for a big surprise. Just watch as an aroused people prove that fearlessness in the face of power is the best way to save us, eventually, from the clutches of Donald Trump.

 

Accountability We must never just turn the page Elliot Kirschner Jan 10 The violence, corruption, and other horrors of this era will not only need to be remembered and marked for posterity. They must be confronted. They must lead to real accountability. And that accountability must come as soon as possible, in every way possible. When this regime falls, it will fall hard. Most of those who appeased it, condoned it, worked for it, and supported it will scatter from the wreckage, hoping that confusion and exhaustion will shield their complicity and their guilt. We cannot allow that to happen. I fear that at the very moment when full accountability will be possible, we will lack the leaders willing to do what is necessary. There has long been a bias in our political culture, reinforced by the antidemocratic elements of our system of government, that grants deference to right-wing forces who falsely claim the mantle of patriotism. Too often—from the aftermath of the Civil War to Watergate to January 6—those who tried to destroy our constitutional order have been excused for their treachery. To that I say, never again. There will be calls from so-called serious-minded people, politicians, pundits, business leaders, and members of the mainstream press, insisting that the highest priority is a national project of reconciliation. We will need to allow for amends and evolving views. But failing to hold those most responsible to account would be a grave mistake of historic consequence, one that would ultimately weaken and potentially irreparably imperil our recovery. Because before you can get to reconciliation, you need an agreed-upon truth. And when the full scale of the crimes and complicity becomes apparent, there can be no choice but accountability. Many should face the legal system. The henchmen and women leading this autocracy are obvious and necessary targets for thorough criminal investigations and likely prosecutions. Already, the president, had there been any justice, would have faced a long litany of serious and provable federal charges after his last term. That list has now grown exponentially. But it will not be enough to go after the Trumps and the likes of Stephen Miller, JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, and Pam Bondi. It must also extend to the masked agents wreaking havoc in our cities. The military officials who followed illegal orders. The phalanx of grifters and con artists who engaged in fraud, corruption, and bribery. Others, whose actions were technically legal but carried out in service to a deranged autocrat, must face permanent consequences to their positions, wealth, livelihoods, and public standing. The law firm partners and university administrators who caved. The business leaders who sucked up. The quiet enablers who told themselves they had no choice. There will be a powerful and understandable desire to move on, to rebuild the nation according to its most enlightened values, to make amends with those who have been harmed, and to somehow regain our standing as a respected member of the community of democratic nations. We cannot engage in these efforts, however, if we treat what we have lived through as an aberration rather than a feature of our nation’s deeper faults and systemic injustices. That is why accountability cannot stop at the personal level. We must examine our systems of government, our economy, and the rule of law. We will need to reform the Supreme Court and protect voting rights. We will need to revisit how power is allocated within our federal system. We will need to break apart rapacious monopolies, regulate dangerous technologies, and reassert science in shaping public health. And we cannot wait for any of this to happen. We must have leaders now who introduce articles of impeachment, who refuse to allow governance to proceed as usual, and who hold members of the business world, academia, and the media accountable. Everyone should be put on notice that we see what is happening, and we will not forget when the bill for this autocracy comes due in a wave of democratic restitution. And when it does, we should disregard those who condescendingly tell those of us who bore witness to “turn the page.” Those urging caution and half measures will be the same ones who minimized the danger when it mattered most. They were wrong then. And they will be wrong again. Wisdom does not come from avoidance. It comes only from a full and unflinching reckoning with the truth. We must choose leaders who understand this imperative. It is the only path to a more perfect union.

Whatever happened to America First?

 

F Whatever happened to America First? Jack Ohman’s You Betcha! Jan 10 Greenland and Cuba are the next contestants on Trump’s might-makes-right reality show By Jack Ohman Contributing Columnist January 9, 2026 Explaining the U.S. invasion of Venezuela and the dramatic capture and spurious arrest of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, President Donald Trump said the quiet part out loud: the United States is back in the business of nation building. “We’re going to be running it with a group,” Trump said Sunday without specifying who that group would include, “and we’re going to make sure it’s run properly,” Before last weekend, nation-building had been anathema to Trump’s MAGA base, and his pronouncement that the U.S. would now “run” Venezuela isn’t exactly “America First,” especially given Wednesday’s update that this U.S. boondoggle would last “for years.” In a Manhattan courtroom on Monday, Maduro declared himself a prisoner of war. The Trump Administration, meanwhile, has portrayed him as a drug dealer, an odd assertion given that Trump just pardoned former Honduran President and convicted drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernandez, not to mention Silk Road website founder Ross Ulbricht, who money-laundered $214 million for drug dealers. For months, Trump and his Secretary of Defense and/or War Pete Hegseth, have been busy destroying what they claimed were Venezuelan drug boats, even though those vessels were not remotely capable of reaching the United States. In one such case, the U.S. killed at least two men clinging to their ship’s burning wreckage, an act that violates our rules of military engagement and would seem to qualify as a war crime. But once you’ve ignored one or two laws and your own Constitution, why stop there? To that end, Trump and his team have also set their sights on Greenland and Cuba. Greenland is under the control of Denmark, a NATO member nation and our longtime ally. Fifty-two Danish soldiers died helping us in Afghanistan and Iraq. Thank you for your service, now hand over your rare earth minerals. “Unfortunately, I think the American president should be taken seriously when he says he wants Greenland,” Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Fredericksen said Monday, adding, “but I will also make it clear that if the U.S. chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops, including NATO and thus the security that has been established since the end of the Second World War.” Can a NATO member invoke Article 5 — the provision that member states will join together to repel an act outside aggression made against any one of them — if that bad actor is also a member? The demise of NATO, of course, has long been one of Vladimir Putin’s top geopolitical goals. No doubt rooting for Trump to pull a Caracas on Nuuk, Greenland’s largest city, or simply charge the purchase of the island on a Trump gold card, so he can sit back and watch the dominoes fall. Speaking of Vlad, former Trump National Security adviser for Russian and European affairs Fiona Hill told a congressional panel in October 2019 that Russia had approached the Trump administration about “some very strange swap arrangement between Venezuela and Ukraine.” Doesn’t seem so strange now, does it? And there’s more, potentially much more. Cuba has been a thorn in the side of the United States since the late dictator Fidel Castro seized power in 1959. To stay in business, it has also relied on Venezuelan oil, which now seems to be back under the direct control of the United States, kind of. Trump said Sunday that he would compel oil companies to spend billions to fix Venezuela’s oil infrastructure “and start making money” for the U.S. By Wednesday, that had morphed into an all-we-can-drink situation, with the U.S. making money off Venezuelan oil “indefinitely.” By stepping on Cuba’s fuel line, the thinking goes, the post-Castro regime is sure to fall. “I’d be concerned,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, said of Havanah’s government. What’s the justification for all of this “Donroe Doctrine,” offer-they-can’t-refuse nonsense? Trump’s domestic policy adviser and in-house thug, Stephen Miller, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that “we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Asked Wednesday if there were any limits on his power, Trump, the convicted tax cheat who was found liable of having sexually assaulted a journalist and whose name appears in the Epstein files with stunning frequency, replied, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” So, where is our imperialist commander in chief going with all this? If we’re looking at a bully-based tripartite global order, with the United States running the Americas, Putin running roughshod in Europe and China taking over Taiwan, the rest of Asia and whatever else it wants, we’re in territory no one could have imagined since World War II.Trump’s domestic policy adviser and in-house thug Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper that “we live in a world, in the real world…that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” As if to drive the might-makes-right point home, Miller’s wife Katie posted a map of Greenland with an American flag overlay to her X account. The caption read, “SOON”. So, where are these wannabe imperialists going with all this? If we’re looking at a bully-based tripartite global order, with the United States running the Americas, Putin running roughshod in Europe, and China taking over Taiwan, Asia, and whatever else it wants, we’re in territory no one could have imagined since World War II. To be clear, that’s potentially the end of the great military alliances such as NATO, SEATO and ANZUS, that were put in place to keep World War III from ever coming to pass. And here I’d thought Trump was elected over the high price of eggs. Jack Ohman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and columnist who also writes at https://substack.com/@jackohman.

VANCE MAY BE WORSE THAN TRUMP