Trump lies show White House is terrified — rightly — of this victim's simple humanity
The first thing that should be said about the fatal shooting in Minneapolis is that the victim’s name was Renee Nicole Good.
Good, 37, was a mother, a wife, a poet and fervent Christian. Her mother, Donna Ganger, told the local newspaper her daughter and her partner were not involved in protests.
“She was probably terrified. Renee was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. She was extremely compassionate. She’s taken care of people all her life. She was loving, forgiving and affectionate. She was an amazing human being,” Ganger said.
Good was a widow. Her husband, a veteran, died in 2023 at 36. They had a son. He’s 6. Good was with her partner when ICE shot her in the face, then dithered long enough for her to bleed out.
A video taken by a witness moments after the shooting shows Good’s partner sitting on the ground with her dog. There’s blood on the snow. Between sobs she can be heard saying, “They killed my wife. I don’t know what to do,” according to The Advocate.
"We stopped to videotape, and they shot her in the head."
“We have a 6-year-old at school.”
Good's former teacher, Kent Wascom, a professor at Old Dominion University, posted a memorial on Twitter.
“I held her baby,” Wascom said. “She was kind and talented, a working-class mom who put herself through school despite circumstances that would’ve crumpled the pathetic rich boy politicians who sadistically abetted her murder.”
He added: “God damn them all.”
Good’s humanity needs to be the first thing that’s said, because the regime that killed her started erasing her humanity from virtually the moment she was murdered last Wednesday morning.
US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said Good was an “agitator” who “weaponized” her vehicle in an act of “domestic terrorism.” The ICE officer, she said, acted in self-defense.
Vice President JD Vance blamed the victim.
“Don't illegally interfere in federal law enforcement operations and try to run over our officers with your car,” he said. “It's really that simple."
On his social media site, the president added his own smears.
“The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting,” Donald Trump wrote. She “then violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer. ... It is hard to believe [the ICE officer] is alive but he is now recovering in the hospital."
Every single word is a lie.
I spent a lot of time yesterday watching and rewatching the video of the shooting (a different one from the video I reference above). And virtually nothing, perhaps literally nothing, the Trump regime is saying matches up with the reality of what happened.
Good was not “very disorderly, obstructing and resisting.” She did not “violently, willfully and viciously [run] over the ICE officer.” The officer in question was not injured in any visible way.
Indeed, after he shot Good three times, and after her SUV rammed into a parked car, the ICE officer checked her condition, then walked to his own vehicle and, moments later, drove away.
I’m not going to do a frame-by-frame analysis. There are pros out there who do that kind of thing better than me. For instance, Eliot Higgins, head of Bellingcat, an investigative reporting group.
“Bellingcat, the New York Times Visual Investigation Team and the Washington Post's Visual Forensic team have all published analysis showing the ICE shooter wasn't in the path of Renee Nicole Good’s vehicle when he shot her, contradicting statements by the president and his cronies,” Higgins said this morning.
Here’s the Times investigation.
I will add a small but telling detail.
The masked ICE officer, who has been identified as Jonathan Ross but whose whereabouts are unknown, was not in any danger.
Good was clearly steering around him, and because of that, Ross had time to position himself in front of the car, crouch, take aim, both arms straight out, and fire. Ross shoots once through the windshield, then twice more through the driver’s side window.
Hers was an act of self-defense, not terror.
His was an act of terror, not self-defense.
The difference between what happened to Renee Nicole Good and what administration officials say happened to her is so vast and obvious that the president is no longer taking any chances.
The FBI said the investigation would be done jointly by federal agents in coordination with the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA). Then the FBI changed its mind.
The BCA “would no longer have access to the case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation,” a spokesman said.
Why would the FBI do this?
To cover up the crime in order to protect the president from the consequences of allowing his secret police to commit crimes.
The FBI is going to try hiding the ugly truth: ICE claims it can declare anyone “illegal” and that it can be the judge, jury and executioner of any accused criminal, including a white, blonde mother of a 6-year-old, who had stuffed animals on the dash and whose partner wailed in despair yards from her bloodied corpse.
But hiding the truth is only part of it. Trump must also erase Good in the same way he erased what happened five years ago, nearly to the day of her death, when he organized and led an attempted paramilitary takeover of the United States Congress.
There is a straight line of causation from Jan. 6, 2021, when Donald Trump launched an insurrection, to Jan. 7, 2026, when his insurgents not only shot an innocent woman but prevented a physician, a bystander, from trying to save her life.
As David Lurie noted, if the GOP cannot win by legitimate means in November, “they will return to the 1/6 strategy of seeking to remain in power with the use of intimidation and force.”
This time, David said, “they won't need to enlist an ad hoc group of thugs to serve as enforcers, because they are assembling a massive force of government-funded and armed thugs who are practicing, and honing, their violent repression skills and strategies on the citizens of cities across the country.”
We may think the evidence of our eyes is so damning that surely Good’s killer will be brought to justice. But we thought the same thing five years ago. Trump and his insurgents mounted a massive disinfo campaign to erase history. They succeeded.
Like last time, they are going to lie, but most of all, they’re going to make it seem like Renee Good’s humanity never existed, just as they made it seem like the J6 insurrection never happened.
Don’t believe me? See this video. After the morning’s shooting, locals set up an impromptu memorial that evening – chalk messages on the sidewalks, candles in solemn remembrance. In this video, an ICE officer literally kicks one of them over. He then taunts a bystander who’s visibly enraged by such disrespect.
They murdered her. They fled the scene of the crime. They stopped a doctor from rendering aid to her. And they lied to protect the man who did the killing. But that wasn’t enough.
They had to desecrate her, too.
This is why I said at the top that the first thing that needs to be said about all this is Renee Nicole Good’s name. The Trump regime is terrified of her humanity, because it puts flesh and bone on the consequences of autocracy — on what happens when a free society allows lawlessness to come straight from the top.