Not Angels, Apparently

Trump responds to two Americans killed by federal agents with the moral calculus of a man reviewing bad press.

Good morning! If you’re looking for a single phrase that explains how we got here, how the Trump administration can bomb fishing boats in the Caribbean, let health insurance lapse, and treat American citizens and immigrants alike with such staggering contempt that federal judges are now issuing contempt threats like parking tickets, you don’t need a white paper. You just need three words from the President of the United States.

“They weren’t angels.”

Trump offered the remark in his NBC interview this week, referring to Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, two American citizens killed by federal immigration agents in January in Minneapolis during the aggressive ICE deployment known as Operation Metro Surge. Good’s death, shot by an ICE agent while she was still in her vehicle, has become one of the central flashpoints of the crackdown, widely reported and still under scrutiny. “You know, I’m not happy with the two incidents,” Trump told NBC correspondent Tom Llamas, before adding, with chilling casualness, “He was not an angel and she was not an angel.”

This wasn’t a throwaway line. It was a rhetorical choice, a moral maneuver, that reframed the story away from what actually happened, two Americans killed by federal agents, and toward whether the dead were sufficiently pure to deserve sympathy. That phrase functions as a kind of moral discounting mechanism: human dignity becomes conditional, compassion becomes something you have to earn, and state violence becomes more acceptable if the victim can be downgraded first. It’s an ugly little purity test imposed after the fact, a way of shifting the conversation away from what ICE did and onto whether the dead were saintly enough to justify outrage.

With those words, Trump may have inadvertently canonized them in the eyes of the American public. None of us are angels. That’s not the standard for being treated as human. And yet in Trump’s rhetorical universe, you can hear the premise plainly: if you weren’t perfect, maybe you were disposable. The moment he reached for that language, weighing their worthiness after death, he revealed the moral rot underneath the performance. They certainly are angels now, not because they were flawless, but because they are beyond his contempt, beyond his need to litigate their humanity in public. In trying to dismiss them, he turned them into something else entirely: a quiet indictment of the cruelty he cannot even recognize.

And that’s what makes the remark so revealing. It supplies the context for everything that follows: the downplaying of deaths into mere optics, the retreat into arithmetic instead of grief, the absence of accountability dressed up as toughness. Even as the administration has been forced, under public pressure, to withdraw roughly 700 federal immigration officers from Minnesota in a partial de-escalation, thousands remain deployed, and the governing posture remains the same. In this world, lives are not lives, they are variables in a narrative about loyalty and legitimacy.

Then comes the second, even more chilling gallop through callousness: two deaths, he says, out of “tens of thousands,” and then “we get bad press.” Not grief, accountability, or restraint. Just arithmetic and optics. The problem isn’t that two people died, the problem is that it made headlines. This is the bureaucratic language of disposability, the authoritarian reflex to minimize harm, justify force, and blame the cameras for noticing. We keep waiting for normal human reactions, empathy, humility, the recognition that power demands care, but this is the reminder: you cannot persuade someone into reasonableness when they do not experience other people as fully real. The cruelty isn’t a bug in the system. It’s the operating system.

And nowhere is that operating system more visible right now than in Minnesota, where the Department of Justice is not merely strained, it is actively collapsing in the field.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota has become ground zero for what happens when Washington turns law enforcement into political theater and expects professionals to pretend it’s normal. Prosecutors are resigning en masse. Career staff are walking out. The office, once staffed by fifty or sixty attorneys, is reportedly down below twenty, a federal justice apparatus running on fumes while ICE barrels through the state like an occupying force.

Judges are furious, and court orders are being violated at a pace so extreme that contempt threats have become routine. One DOJ lawyer in a Minneapolis courtroom finally cracked under the weight of it, telling a judge, “This job sucks,” admitting ICE simply doesn’t respond when asked to comply with judicial orders, and half-joking that she wished the court would hold her in contempt just so she could sleep for twenty-four hours.

It’s not because Minnesota prosecutors suddenly forgot how to do their jobs. It’s because ICE has become an impossible client; unresponsive, unaccountable, untethered from the basic premise that the executive branch is supposed to obey the courts. The professionals in the field are being ordered to absorb the political violence of Washington’s agenda while the people issuing the commands remain safely above the blast radius.

Pam Bondi’s Justice Department has now perfected a new model: law enforcement not as justice, but as regime enforcement.

Bondi herself reportedly ducked press conferences and sent Todd Blanche out alone like a substitute teacher assigned to explain why the class is on fire. Meanwhile, she records bizarre selfie videos announcing arrests “at my direction,” as if the Attorney General is personally live-tweeting prosecutions for extra credit with Trump.

The Don Lemon case is the purest distillation of this insanity: a journalist present at a protest, repeatedly clarifying he was there as press, arrested across the country in Los Angeles in a display that was meant as pure humiliation theater. Even the attempt to restrict his travel got smacked down by a magistrate judge. This is what authoritarianism looks like in practice: overreach, spectacle, legal flailing, and the assumption that intimidation is itself a form of governance.

The result is exactly what you would expect in any functioning institution: people leave. The DOJ cannot run on loyalty oaths and press releases alone. You can only ask lawyers to prosecute nonsense for so long before they decide they would rather do literally anything else, including selling artisanal jam at a farmers market.

This is the same pattern playing out nationally now, not just in courtrooms but in the federal workforce itself.

The Trump administration has finalized a sweeping new rule stripping job protections from up to fifty thousand career civil servants, a Schedule F purge dressed up as “accountability.” The message is explicit: expertise is optional, independence is dangerous, and whistleblowing will now be handled safely inside agencies, where inconvenient truths can be quietly buried like radioactive waste. The White House press secretary said it plainly: if people aren’t working hard “on behalf of this president,” they’re not welcome.

Congress, naturally, is now playing hostage games with the Department of Homeland Security, because DHS funding includes FEMA and TSA and everything else we actually need, while ICE operates like a militarized cult with its own separate war chest.

Democrats are demanding basic restraints: no masks, judicial warrants, limits on racial profiling, standards on use of force. Republicans are calling it a far-left Christmas list. The truth underneath it all is the same old scam: ICE funding is held hostage to keep the rest of DHS alive, the same way Oregon’s Rural Schools Act lets the timber industry say, cut down more trees or the kids lose their classrooms. Governance by extortion is still extortion, even when it comes with appropriations language.

The Pentagon has apparently decided that in between China, Iran, Russia, and an unstable global security environment, its highest priority is… picking a fight with children.

Yes, the Department of Defense is now threatening to cut ties with Scouting America unless the Scouts abandon inclusivity and return to “God and country” values, because nothing screams national defense like bullying Cub Scouts over gender ideology. The military’s longstanding partnership with one of the country’s most effective civic institutions is now being treated as another front in the war on “wokeness,” because the real enemy is apparently a 14-year-old earning a merit badge while not being sufficiently ideologically pure.

Hovering over all of it, the resignations, the crackdowns, the bureaucratic contempt, the moral rot, is the unmistakable sense that the people in charge are not governing so much as improvising their way through power with the emotional maturity of a cable-news team.

Which brings us, inevitably, to the President’s latest contribution to the genre of Trumpian comedy-horror: the “discombobulator.”

The “discombobulator” is pure Trumpian absurdism: the President of the United States casually boasting about a mysterious super-weapon that “discombobulated everything,” then immediately retreating into secrecy when asked what it actually is. “What discombulated? Well, I’m not allowed to talk about it,” he says, before adding, with the gravitas of a man describing a cartoon gadget, that “nothing worked, even including humans.” Pressed for details, the explanation collapses into the timeless masterpiece of non-explanation: “Well, it did something.” It’s less national security briefing than improv night at Mar-a-Lago.

And even beyond the ridiculousness, defense analysts have noted that Trump’s rambling description doesn’t clearly match any single known system, suggesting he may be confusing or blending multiple technologies into one vague, branded wonder-weapon in his head. Electronic warfare, communications jamming, cyber disruption, these are real categories, but Trump narrates them like a magical spell that makes reality stop functioning. The moment is funny because it’s ridiculous, but it’s also revealing: war and state power reduced to personal mythology, with the details hand-waved away behind “I’m not allowed to talk about it” and the implicit promise that only he has access to the secret discombobulating button.

As all of this institutional decay plays out, the economy is quietly confirming that the vibes are not, in fact, immaculate. January layoffs surged to the highest level for the month since 2009. Big Tech stocks are sliding. Bitcoin is down. The speculative sugar high is wearing off, and the real economy is left staring at mass cuts, hollowed-out newsrooms, and a federal workforce being converted into at-will political furniture.

Even The Washington Post, one of the last major institutions capable of sustained investigative accountability, has reportedly laid off a third of its staff. Democracy doesn’t always die in darkness, sometimes it dies in downsizing.

So that’s where we are this morning: a Justice Department bleeding out in Minnesota, an immigration apparatus operating beyond the law, a federal workforce being reshaped into ideological obedience, a Pentagon shadowboxing children, markets wobbling, and a president describing warfare like a man pitching a theme park ride.

They weren’t angels, he says. No, they were human, and that is supposed to be enough.