Conservative columnist Michael Warren says President Donald Trump has one response to most things that bother him, but it’s not saving him this time.
“The Trump administration may be learning the hard way that its de facto policy of shooting your mouth off first and asking investigatory questions later is providing diminishing returns,” Warren said in the Dispatch. “Tricia McLaughlin, the ubiquitous spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, is a case in point.”
Even Fox Business anchors are asking McLaughlin if the Trump administration is sticking with its off-the-cuff description of Homeland Security shooting victim Alex Pretti as a “domestic terrorist.” White House advisor Stephen Miller similarly slimed Pretti as an “assassin” in two posts, one of which was reposted by Vice President JD Vance. The commander-at-large of the Border Patrol even claimed Pretti was an individual seeking to “do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” An official DHS statement from Saturday repeated the same phrase.
But then came a slew of public footage presenting what appears to be an execution-style shooting of a U.S. citizen in the back. Now, suddenly, Trump is having to walk back his administration’s claims “… hey, look, bottom line: Everybody in this room, we view that as a very unfortunate incident.”
After being confronted on Fox, Warren points out that McLaughlin refused to embrace the administration’s initial “terrorist” label for Pretti, and instead blamed her administration’s vicious, false labels on “reports from CBP on the ground” and the “chaotic scene.” Just to make sure, the FOX entertainer again gave McLaughlin a chance to embrace the label, and she refused.
The Trump administration is late the party on this realization, said Warren, but there’s a reason “it’s standard protocol for all law enforcement agencies to decline to speak about ongoing investigations, even if it is often a convenient excuse for public officials to avoid commenting on controversial incidents.”
But the Pretti situation is hardly the only recent law enforcement-related controversy in which officials have needed reminders about this basic concept, said Warren. When Minneapolis police initially described the death of George Floyd as a “medical incident,” on-the-scene footage soon painted police as liars. The same can be said for favorable claims Texas administrators made about the May 2022 Uvalde, Texas school shooting — before footage revealed officers to be cowering outside a classroom while the shooter picked off one child after another. It did not help that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) initially praised law enforcement’s bravery.
“These sorts of misstatements and incomplete accounts are embarrassing, frustrating, and detrimental to public trust. But what makes the Trump administration’s own premature responses to last week’s shooting in Minneapolis so particularly galling is the brazen dishonesty,” said Warren. “Officials like Noem and Miller made their false assessments about Alex Pretti not with bad information or poor judgment of initial facts but as part of an irresponsible public-relations effort to shape the narrative.”
Warren said the administration is now quietly walking back its aggressive lies with the removal of officers in charge at the time of the Pretti killing, but argued this does not mean Trump is capable of learning and adapting.
“[This] is a tacit acknowledgment that this was a screw-up. But will anyone in the Trump administration learn the lesson?” Warren asked.
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