When the Lies Stop Working

Courts, allies, and institutions push back as Trump narrates a victory parade to himself

Today’s roundup is sponsored by:

Good morning! The Trump administration is having one of those weeks where reality keeps showing up uninvited, armed with documents, judges, and foreign governments that decline to play along. The common thread is simple: lies told quickly, confidently, and loudly are now being dismantled slowly, methodically, and on the record, and the White House is discovering that once the paper trail hardens, no amount of tantrum fixes it.

In Minnesota, the official story of Alex Pretti’s killing has finally collapsed under its own weight. After branding the 37-year-old ICU nurse a “domestic terrorist” and “would-be assassin,” the administration is now quietly backing away from its own rhetoric. NPR reports that an internal Customs and Border Protection review, based on body-camera footage, makes no mention of Pretti attacking officers or threatening them with a weapon. No brandishing, and no massacre. Just a chaotic street encounter, pepper spray, a shouted “he’s got a gun,” and gunfire seconds later. In reality, the internal account aligns with what the videos showed all along, not what the cowboy hat wearing poseur Kristi Noem and the parasitic Stephen Miller hurried to declare before the body was even cold.

Miller’s latest contribution to this slow-motion reckoning was to admit that agents who killed Pretti “may not have been” following protocol, an understatement so bloodless it deserves its own exhibit. This is the same man who previously labeled Pretti a terrorist and is now retreating into paperwork language, a la Adolf Eichmann, as if misclassifying a human being as an existential threat is just a clerical error. The pattern is familiar by now: escalate first, sanctify force, then hide behind process once evidence intrudes.

This week’s pattern is obvious: confident claims get blasted into the bloodstream, and then reality arrives, on camera, in court filings, in official statements, and the story changes. One tool that’s helped me catch that sleight of hand in real time is Ground News, today’s sponsor.

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That’s what you’re seeing in the screenshots, stories tagged with “Mixed” vs “Very High” factuality, plus ownership notes like “Murdoch Family” or “Private Equity: KKR.” Their bias ratings are composites drawn from multiple third-party assessments, and their factuality score is likewise based on external ratings, so it’s not just vibes, it’s a transparent framework you can interrogate.

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Courts are no longer indulging the performance. Minnesota’s chief federal judge has summoned the acting head of ICE to court and openly threatened contempt sanctions, writing that the court’s patience “is at an end” after repeated defiance and slow-walking of release orders. Judges across the district are documenting what this surge actually looks like: unlawful detentions, people flown out of state to evade judicial review, and a federal enforcement apparatus behaving less like law enforcement than a roaming paramilitary force allergic to oversight.

Italian media have been openly reporting on encounters with ICE agents in Minnesota in which journalists say they were threatened while documenting enforcement operations. According to Italian outlets, reporters attempting to film ICE activity were warned off by agents who appeared irritated not just by protesters, but by the presence of cameras themselves, a detail that has landed poorly in a country with fresh memories of state intimidation and a deep allergy to paramilitary swagger.

That reporting has collided head-on with another unfolding controversy: the Trump administration’s plan to involve ICE in security operations connected to the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina. Italian officials insist the agents would not conduct immigration enforcement on Italian soil and would play only a limited, technical role. But the optics are already radioactive. Milan’s mayor publicly blasted ICE as a force “that kills,” while opposition politicians questioned why a U.S. agency now associated with unlawful shootings, media intimidation, and judicial rebukes should have any presence tied to a global sporting event.

The connective tissue is impossible to miss. At home, ICE is defying court orders, lying about shootings, and threatening journalists. Abroad, allies are watching the footage, reading the court filings, and drawing their own conclusions. What the White House insists is a matter of “force protection” increasingly looks, from the outside, like an agency unaccustomed to scrutiny and hostile to accountability, whether that scrutiny comes from judges, cameras, or foreign governments.

That same loss of restraint spilled into the international realm this week when ICE agents attempted to enter the Ecuadorian consulate in Minneapolis, a move so basic-law illegal it required a consulate staffer to physically block the door while agents threatened to “grab” them. Ecuador promptly filed a formal diplomatic protest. Trump’s immigration operation is now triggering Vienna Convention incidents.

The atmosphere this creates doesn’t stay neatly contained. On Tuesday night, Rep. Ilhan Omar was rushed and sprayed with an unknown liquid from a syringe during a Minneapolis town hall, attacked as she was calling for abolishing ICE and impeaching DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. Omar, who has received more death threats than any other member of Congress, brushed off security and finished the event anyway. Capitol Police, meanwhile, announced that threats against lawmakers have surged to nearly 15,000 cases last year. This is what stochastic violence looks like when it stops being theoretical: the rhetoric doesn’t wield the syringe, but it builds the permission structure.

The Federal Reserve is expected to defy Trump today by holding interest rates steady, its first decision since reports surfaced of a federal criminal probe into Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Powell has called the investigation politically motivated, and economists have been blunt about what’s at stake: when central banks lose independence, short-term political sugar highs turn into long-term inflation hangovers. Trump wants rate cuts, Powell wants stability. The Fed’s likely refusal may be less about economics than about institutional survival, a theme that’s repeating everywhere this week.

As the White House is forced to walk back falsehoods at home, it’s discovering that Canada is no longer interested in validating invented narratives abroad. After U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on Fox News to claim Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had quietly walked back his Davos critique of U.S. dominance, Carney responded with a public, emphatic “no.” He didn’t just deny the retreat, he doubled down in Parliament, saying plainly that “the world has changed, Washington has changed,” and adding that there is currently “almost nothing normal left in the United States.”

Rather than absorbing the critique, Trump reached for the usual tools: tariff threats, diplomatic snubs, and now pressure via defense ties. Reports suggest Canada is reconsidering its planned purchase of 88 U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets as part of a broader effort to diversify trade and reduce dependency on an increasingly erratic neighbor. The U.S. ambassador responded by warning that NORAD, the joint U.S.–Canada air defense command that has anchored North American security for nearly 70 years, would “have to change,” a reminder rather than reassurance. Once again, the White House response to dissent is escalation, not reflection, which only proves Carney’s Davos point all over again.

And then there’s Trump himself, still narrating a triumph as the scaffolding around him creaks. His Iowa rally yesterday was a rolling victory parade of superlatives and grievance, wrapped around a midterm warning, padded with side quests, ethanol, Deere, “beautiful women,” paid agitators, Biden allegedly unable to find stairs, and capped, inevitably, with “golden age” mythology. A few hours later, he took the act to the Machine Shed Restaurant, serving a diner-table remix of the same speech: border panic, crime, gas prices, tariffs, midterms, plus press-bashing, a Venezuela improvisation, and yet another implicit wink at extending his grip on power beyond the constitutional two-term limit, most recently underscored when he asked on Truth Social, “RECORD NUMBERS ALL OVER THE PLACE! Should I try for a fourth term?”

That contrast is the quiet punchline of today’s news cycle. While Trump keeps remixing the same set list, grievance, nostalgia, threat, courts are issuing orders, documents are contradicting talking points, allies are refusing to play along, and institutions are drawing lines he can’t simply shout through. The spectacle hasn’t stopped, but for the first time in a while, it’s no longer setting the terms of reality.