“Our press secretary, Sean Spicer, gave alternative facts.” These were the words of the senior White House aide Kellyanne Conway on NBC television’s Meet the Press in January 2017. “Alternative facts” instantly set a template for the era of Donald Trump.
So when Alex Pretti, 37, an intensive care nurse, was shot dead by federal agents in Minneapolis last Saturday, White House officials immediately moved to brand him a “would-be assassin” and “domestic terrorist” who had been brandishing a gun. This time, however, the tried and trusted playbook did not work.
In the ensuing hours, multiple witness videos emerged showing that Pretti held only a phone in his hand when border patrol agents pushed him to the ground. They also made clear that an agent found Pretti’s gun near his waist and removed it seconds before another agent shot a restrained Pretti in the back.
Facing a widespread backlash from the public, Democrats and even his own Republican party, Trump was forced into a partial retreat, distancing himself from efforts by aides such as Stephen Miller and Department of Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, to demonise Pretti, and shuffling leadership of immigration operations in Minneapolis.
For once, the president’s reality distortion field – which promised Mexico would pay for his border wall, claimed Covid would disappear “like a miracle”, insisted the 2020 election was stolen, and rewrote the history of the January 6 insurrection – had met its match. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post warned: “Mr President, the American people didn’t vote for these scenes, and you can’t continue to order them to not believe their lying eyes.”
White House aides had already tried to deny the video evidence when 37-year-old Renee Good was shot three times in her vehicle by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer in Minneapolis. If anything, the footage of Pretti’s killing was even more comprehensive, damning and ubiquitous, ensuring the quick collapse of the official narrative.
Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, told reporters: “Thank God, thank God we have video.”
The anger at ICE broke through to online spaces that normally avoid politics. The Washington Post noted that the moderator of r/catbongos, an 800,000-member subreddit featuring videos of people playing their cats like drums, wrote: “If you still support Trump/ICE even slightly, you’re not welcome in this sub.” The post received more than 40,000 Reddit upvotes.
In addition, an older video emerged showing Pretti giving a final salute to a military veteran he treated at a hospital, a display of compassion that rendered the domestic terrorist claim even more preposterous. And pro-gun Republicans took exception to the idea that Pretti made himself a legitimate target simply by carrying a gun.
All these elements combined to make this a rare case – perhaps even a turning point – in Trump’s decade-long effort to emulate authoritarian leaders who demonstrate their power by requiring citizens to accept lies as truth.
Charlie Sykes, a conservative broadcaster and author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, said: “This was dramatic. This is an administration that had become extremely cocky to the point of hubris about its ability to bend truth, and suddenly they come up to this particular case, and what made this different was they were telling Americans to ignore the evidence of their own eyes. That turned out to be the bridge too far for them.”
Sykes added: “Stephen Miller seems to think that he can pull off that Jedi mind trick: you are not seeing what you think you are seeing; the reality is completely different from what is being documented here. Obviously that failed rather spectacularly. I’m interested in trying to figure out why.
“The murder of Renee Good and the murder of Alex Pretti broke through in a way that few, if any, other stories of the Trump era have broken through. They broke through the information bubbles and were disseminated – whether it’s Reddit or websites devoted to rock climbing – and people were talking about it. It made Stephen Miller’s counter-reality utterly unsustainable.”
Typically, when Trump and his allies make an assertion, a Maga media machine swings into action to flood the zone and overwhelm the doubters. This time, however, the tools of social media, streaming and viral videos turned against them.
Rick Wilson, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “I expected the Maga influencers were going to do the full-court press and stick with the administration, but they bailed on it. They punched out pretty early in this process. It’s a very interesting moment and not great for the Trump org.
“I have a sense that they felt a great disturbance in the Force, that they thought they could always control the narrative that was being mediated through these technologies, and I know they don’t feel that today.”
Since Trump came to power in 2017, perhaps no author has been cited by political commentators more often than George Orwell, and no book more often than his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which begins: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” The administration’s effort to manipulate the deaths of Good and Pretti prompted numerous commentators to draw comparisons with the Ministry of Truth and its constant rewriting of historical records.
Laura Beers, author of Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the 21st Century, said: “The administration is saying don’t believe your own eyes is about as Orwellian as you get. This idea that the regime can make you see reality as they want you to see it, and not as it actually is, is one of the scariest themes from not just Nineteen Eighty-Four but also Animal Farm and all Orwell’s writing. It’s very apropos to our current moment.”
But Beers, a history professor at American University in Washington, noted that the Pretti case in Minneapolis felt different. “The thing is that people are willing to go along to get along until they’re not. And maybe, just maybe, this is the moment where people are not, where they’re saying that 2+2=4, and you can’t make me believe otherwise. I hope so at least.”
The mobile phone made all the difference. Walz has encouraged residents to film ICE agents to help create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not only as a record for posterity but to bank evidence for future prosecution. Tragically, Pretti was holding up a phone when he was assaulted.
Such technology did not exist when Orwell was covering the Spanish civil war and saw newspaper reports that bore no relation to the facts. Beers added: “That’s not the world that we live in any more. The availability of video has made it harder to convince people that 2+2=5 or get them to accept it even if they know that it’s not true. That is the way in which the world of 2026 is pretty different from the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four and 1948 when the book was being written.”
What is less certain is whether Trump’s shift in tone on the death of Pretti represents a profound shift or merely a temporary setback. As the week wore on, he was soon back to attacking the Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey, and pushing baseless conspiracy theories that the protesters are being paid and the 2020 election was stolen. His mirror world may have a crack but it is far from shattered.
Reed Galen, president of the Union, a pro-democracy coalition, said he expected Trump’s lies to continue. “He’s not capable of anything else,” he said. “I’m so far beyond the kicking and screaming; that’s just the reality as an observer. He’s not capable of telling the truth. He’s given his people lots and lots of leash to be crazy and say things that are demonstrably untrue, so that’s not going to change.”
