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One prominent conservative writer is arguing that the White House's response to the fatal shooting of 37 year-old U.S. citizen Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota last weekend marks a turning point in how President Donald Trump's administration views its relationship with the law.

In a Monday conversation hosted the New York Times' Matthew Rose, conservative columnist David French – speaking alongside the Times' Lydia Polgreen and Michelle Goldberg — asserted that Pretti's death is merely the latest escalation from a president who has continued to push the legal envelope. French cautioned that Americans are collectively "witnessing the total breakdown of any meaningful system of accountability for federal officials."

"The combination of President Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons, his ongoing campaign of pardoning friends and allies, his politicized prosecutions and now his administration’s assurances that federal officers have immunity are creating a new legal reality in the United States," he wrote. "The national government is becoming functionally lawless, and the legal system is struggling to contain his corruption."

French — a retired major in the U.S. Army's Judge Advocate General Corps — went on to observe that Trump was "exploiting years of legal developments that have helped insulate federal officials from both criminal and civil accountability." He posited that the American legal system has been shaped by years of belief that the federal government is a rational, good-faith actor while people who criticize the government are presumed to be "almost always wrong." Now, in Trump's second term, French warned that Americans are "tasting the bitter fruit of Trump’s dreadful policies" with little recourse.

"The Trump administration breaks the law, and also ruthlessly exploits all the immunities it’s granted by law," he wrote. "The situation is unsustainable for a constitutional republic."

Rose prodded French on his recent argument that the United States during Trump's second term is similar to the system of government described by Nazi-era Jewish labor lawyer Ernst Fraenkel as "the dual state." Fraenkel's theory was that German citizens under the Nazi regime simultaneously lived in "a capitalist economy governed by stable laws" and under a brutal dictator who carried out heinous acts of genocide. French commented that while the "the dual state" under Trump is "not to the same extent as the Nazis," Fraenkel's theory was "still relevant."

"The Nazis didn’t create their totalitarian state immediately. Instead, they were able to lull much of the population to sleep just by keeping their lives relatively normal. As you say, they went to work, paid their taxes, entered into contracts and did all the things you normally do in a functioning nation," French said. "But if you crossed the government, then you passed into a different state entirely, where you would feel the full weight of fascist power — regardless of the rule of law."

The largest newspaper in Minnesota on Thursday published a scathing rebuke of Donald Trump's massive ICE surge in the state, with the editorial board decrying the operation as a "military occupation" that so far "seems to prioritize volume and spectacle over judgment and care."

The Minnesota Star-Tribune's editorial board likened the massive enforcement operation in the state to a "siege" and argued it was like nothing the embattled state has seen before, with violence and indiscriminate ICE stops of "any American they encounter in the street but especially people of certain colors," going far beyond what the stated pretext might call for.

"Minnesota has endured unrest before. What the state is now experiencing looks and feels different," the board wrote. "Battalions of armed federal agents are moving through neighborhoods, transit hubs, malls and parking lots and staging near churches, mosques and schools. Strangers with guns have metastasized in spaces where daily life should be routine and safe. It feels like a military occupation."

As the board laid out, the Department of Homeland Security and Secretary Kristi Noem have claimed that the enforcement surge in response to recent stories of welfare fraud in the state, which has already been documented, prosecuted and resulted in convictions, despite renewed right-wing media attention. Noem also claimed that ICE agents would only target "criminal illegal aliens hurting Americans," but the board countered that this "is not what Minnesotans are currently experiencing."

"What we are witnessing is the storming of the state by the federal government," the board continued. "Fraud investigation and immigration enforcement in Minnesota have become a pretext for a sweeping federal show of force that bears little relationship to the problem it claims to address. It is indiscriminate. Noncitizen immigrants without legal status make up roughly 1.5% of Minnesota’s population — less than half the national average. Nothing about that figure justifies the scale, posture or tactics now widely deployed."

The board conceded that immigration enforcement efforts must not be done away with entirely and cast doubt on the possibility that ICE would be outright abolished. Instead, it insisted that reforms must be put in place to rein the agency in, force it to comply with the rule of law and subject it to accountability measures that "must also have teeth."

"It must be structured to operate within the same constitutional norms that govern other law-enforcement bodies," the board argued. "That means clear rules of engagement. Training must be rebuilt, not lightly adjusted. Rigorous de-escalation training and understanding of the community impact of enforcement actions must be prioritized. The current ambiguity invites overreach and more deaths. Clear limits on force and escalation protect civilians, undocumented residents and agents alike."

The board added: "The central question ahead is not whether immigration enforcement will continue, but whether it can credibly continue under the current structure and imprimatur of ICE. If battalions of militarized federal agents can occupy American cities under the pretext of combating fraud, arresting undocumented felons and targeting any American seemingly at will without transparency or accountability, then no state is immune. It is currently happening in Minnesota. It’s wrong, and it must be stopped."