MS NOW producer Steve Benen points out that the White House recently claimed Minneapolis mother Renee Good, was a “deranged lunatic” who was engaged in “domestic terrorism” when she was fatally shot in the face by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross.
But during his “mind-numbing White House press conference Tuesday,” Benen said President Donald Trump did an about-face, claiming he “felt terribly” about what happened.
The president argued that ICE agents are “going to make mistakes sometimes. ICE is going to be too rough with somebody … They’re going to make a mistake. Sometimes it can happen.” He then called Good’s death a “tragedy” and a “horrible thing.”
Benen said Trump revealed the whole reason behind his change of heart almost in the same breath — and his reason is just as shallow as one can expect with this president.
“It was a painful reminder that to Trump’s way of thinking, one of the most notable things about Good was how much one of her relatives liked him,” said Benen. “The president was perfectly comfortable with his White House publicly condemning the victim, right up until he discovered her father’s political views, at which point it became time for a shift, which is every bit as morally vacuous as it sounds.”
Trump admitted that he’d learned the victim’s father “was a tremendous Trump fan,” while referring to himself in the third person. “He was all for Trump. Loved Trump.”
“I hope he still feels that way,” Trump added.
This, said Benen, is not only the conduct of a self-absorbed person, but also of a president with little to no grip on ICE agents' conduct. Benen said Trump argued that the shooting deaths of Minnesota mothers in the conducting of ICE activity “just happens.”
“No, it does not,” countered Benen. “We’re not talking about a natural disaster, we’re talking about an act of deadly violence perpetrated by a federal agent against an unarmed civilian. What’s more, if the president genuinely believes that ICE agents are ‘going to make mistakes sometimes,’ he could support federal investigations into such ‘mistakes.’
But that’s not what’s happening, said Benen, despite the fact that a Minnesota FBI agent “determined that sufficient grounds existed” to open a civil rights probe into the behavior of Ross. In fact, Trump’s Justice Department instead blockaded local attempts by law enforcement to investigate the death.
