‘Trump saw it wasn’t playing well’: White House insiders on the chaotic response to Alex Pretti shooting

New details have emerged about how President Donald Trump and his administration responded to the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis over the weekend.

Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, was bundled to the ground and shot multiple times by Customs and Border Protection agents after a confrontation in the Minnesota city just after 9 a.m CT Saturday.

“Shots fired in Minneapolis,” CBP Commander-at-Large Greg Bovino alerted the White House and the Department of Homeland Security in a text chain around five minutes later, according to NBC News, which spoke to 15 administration insiders about how the events unfolded.

Over the following hour, Trump spoke to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz talked to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, subsequently reiterating his long-standing demand on X (Twitter) that the president withdrew his forces.

By 11.10 a.m. ET, DHS began briefing that Pretti had been armed and, at 12.31 p.m, posted its now-infamous statement – along with a picture of the victim’s 9mm semi-automatic pistol, which he was licensed to carry – claiming the “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” had violently “violently resisted” the agents and forced them to fire the “defensive shots” that killed him.

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Between 1.22 p.m. and 1.43 p.m., Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller posted three tweets in which he referred to Pretti as “a domestic terrorist” who had tried “to assassinate federal law enforcement,” a “would-be assassin” and “an assassin,” leaning into Bovino’s account of what happened.

Trump and Vice President JD Vance took the same line in posts of their own, as did Bovino and Noem at their respective press conferences later in the day. However, as eyewitness video swirled across news sites and social media, viewers quickly came to their own conclusions and disputed the official line.

According to NBC, Trump paced the halls of the White House and watched TV coverage, quickly realising the administration’s account was not being accepted.

“He doesn’t like chaos on his watch,” an official told the network.

“He’s the smartest guy I know, and he saw it wasn’t playing well,” a Republican lawmaker added. “The visuals were not playing well. He understands TV… He saw it for himself.”

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On Sunday morning, the administration sent Bovino, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche out to defend Operation Metro Surge on CNN, ABC, Fox News, and NBC respectively.

Wiles reportedly realised the DHS’s messaging was backfiring and urged Trump to dispatch border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota to take charge of the situation, a step he subsequently resolved to take.

The president otherwise spent the day fielding calls from anxious allies and declined to defend Noem during a phone interview with The Wall Street Journal, saying only: “We’re looking, we’re reviewing everything and will come out with a determination.”

By evening, he had decided to make a change, conscious of the need to support a policy with $170 billion in funding behind it while avoiding alienating swing voters in a midterm election year.

“The reality is, you can’t stop what you’re doing,” a former White House official told NBC. “This is the whole point of ICE existing in these cities, and Minnesota is not going to be the last state that ICE goes to. Oregon was next. We were not done. We need to keep going.”

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On Monday, Trump duly announced the Homan move, which saw Bovino sent back to California.

He also held conciliatory calls with Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and, later, a two-hour crisis meeting with Noem and her top aide Corey Lewandowski in the Oval Office, with Wiles and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt present but Miller absent.

Leavitt had declined to defend Noem and Miller at a briefing with reporters earlier in the day.

A “blame game” then erupted in the media after an Axios report was published containing a quote from Noem in which she said: “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen.”

Miller responded with a statement to CNN in which he suggested the CBP “may not have been following” the protocol established for immigration officers after the earlier killing of Renee Good on January 7, adding that the administration’s initial information about Pretti’s death had all come from Bovino’s agency.

Also Tuesday, Trump spoke publicly about the killing for the first time, rejecting the assessment that the victim was an assassin but declaring that “you can’t have guns” at a protest.

“We’re going to de-escalate a little bit,” he later told Fox during a trip to Iowa, denying the step represented a “pullback” from Minnesota.

“The conservative base is p***ed,” a Republican strategist told NBC, summing up the debacle, warning that the president risked “demoralizing” the voters he will rely on in November with such erratic leadership.