Trump’s enforcers have unleashed a fascist fairytale on America

It’s fairytale time in America. We’re living through a dark, fascist version of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes – but it’s a fairytale that may yet offer a glimmer of hope.

On 24 January, Alex Pretti, a US citizen employed as a nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs hospital, was shot dead by federal Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents. Videos authenticated by multiple reputable media outlets show a clear, disturbing sequence of events.

Pretti approaches federal agents with his mobile phone raised as they detain someone on the street. An agent shoves a woman. Pretti steps between her and the officer, who shoves Pretti and then pepper-sprays him. Multiple agents surround Pretti, forcing him face-down, while others pile into a chaotic scrum around him. One officer punches him repeatedly. Another pulls what appears to be a holstered firearm (which Pretti was licensed to carry) from his waist and steps away from the melee with the gun.

A different officer then draws his own weapon and shoots Pretti – who appears to be on his hands and knees – from behind. Three more shots are fired by federal agents. Then, as officers move away, another six shots are fired into Pretti’s prone body.

It was the second fatal shooting by federal agents in Minneapolis that month – the first involved Renee Nicole Good, another US citizen protesting federal immigration enforcement tactics – and federal authorities lost no time in offering a version of events starkly contradicted by the video evidence.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, branded Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and a “would-be assassin”. CBP commander Gregory Bovino claimed Pretti wanted to “massacre law enforcement”. President Trump, meanwhile, decried Minneapolis protesters as “insurrectionists” and declared the outcry over Pretti’s killing “a criminal cover-up” for “massive financial fraud” in Minnesota.

America had reached peak Orwell. A citizen protesting brutal immigration enforcement tactics was gunned down in full view of multiple cameras, while senior government officials responded with a brazenly false version of events. Don’t believe your own eyes, they seemed to be telling the public. Don’t believe the evidence. Believe us instead.

This, of course, was hardly a new tactic in Trump’s America. A decade ago, Trump marvelled at his own ability to persuade supporters to close their eyes to his misdeeds: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”

And it was, like, incredible. Trump persuaded millions of Americans that the 2020 election was “stolen” – a mass delusion that ultimately led to the failed effort by a mob of his supporters to seize control of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. There, too, Trump the master illusionist flipped reality on its head, convincing millions that the violent January 6 rioters were peaceful patriots, wrongly persecuted by the state.

Over and over again, the rest of us were left to marvel at Trump’s seemingly limitless ability to persuade his Maga base to believe even the most outlandish claims. In Trump’s version of reality, he had ended eight wars, eliminated inflation and driven petrol prices below two dollars a gallon. It scarcely mattered that so many of these assertions were demonstrably false.

But the killing of Alex Pretti may yet mark a turning point.

Already, small fissures were appearing within the Maga coalition – sparked by the Epstein files, Trump’s bizarre talk of invading Greenland, and a dozen other scandals, major and minor. Then came Minneapolis, and images of heavily armed, masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents flooding the streets: storming into private homes, detaining children, pepper-spraying civilians and – inevitably – killing protesters. First Good. Then Pretti. Even the names sound like characters in a morality play.

This time, however, the Trumpian magic seems to be losing its power.

Perhaps it was the rawness and immediacy of the footage. Perhaps it was the fact that Pretti worked with veterans. Or perhaps it was the Trump administration’s initial insistence that a citizen carrying a holstered, licensed handgun was, by definition, behaving suspiciously – a sentiment anathema to hardcore Maga Second Amendment absolutists.

Whatever the reason, something shifted.

Gun-rights groups protested. Veterans’ organisations rallied to Pretti’s defence. Republican leaders called for transparent investigations. Astonishingly, a YouGov poll conducted immediately after Pretti’s death found that 19 per cent of Republicans now support abolishing ICE.

And then Trump blinked.

By the end of Monday, his tone had become more conciliatory. CBP commander Bovino was reassigned to other duties. Trump was promising that state law enforcement could conduct an independent investigation into Pretti’s death.

All of a sudden, a few of Maga World’s most loyal subjects seem to be opening their eyes – and noticing what the rest of the world has known for a long time: the Emperor has no clothes.