<\/p>\n
\u201cO<\/span>ur press secretary, Sean Spicer, gave alternative facts.\u201d These were the words of the senior White House aide Kellyanne Conway on NBC television\u2019s Meet the Press<\/a> in January 2017. \u201cAlternative facts\u201d instantly set a template for the era of Donald Trump.<\/p>\n So when Alex Pretti, 37, an intensive care nurse, was shot dead<\/a> by federal agents in Minneapolis last Saturday, White House officials immediately moved to brand him a \u201cwould-be assassin\u201d and \u201cdomestic terrorist\u201d who had been brandishing a gun. This time, however, the tried and trusted playbook did not work.<\/p>\n In the ensuing hours, multiple witness videos<\/a> 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\u2019s gun near his waist and removed it seconds before another agent shot a restrained Pretti in the back.<\/p>\n Facing a widespread backlash from the public, Democrats and even his own Republican party, Trump was forced into a partial retreat<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n For once, the president\u2019s reality distortion field \u2013 which promised Mexico would pay for his border wall, claimed Covid would disappear \u201clike a miracle\u201d, insisted the 2020 election was stolen, and rewrote the history of the January 6 insurrection \u2013 had met its match. Rupert Murdoch\u2019s New York Post warned<\/a>: \u201cMr President, the American people didn\u2019t vote for these scenes, and you can\u2019t continue to order them to not believe their lying eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n White House aides had already tried to deny the video evidence when 37-year-old Renee Good was shot three times<\/a> in her vehicle by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer in Minneapolis. If anything, the footage of Pretti\u2019s killing was even more comprehensive, damning and ubiquitous, ensuring the quick collapse of the official narrative.<\/p>\n Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, told reporters<\/a>: \u201cThank God, thank God we have video.\u201d<\/p>\n The anger at ICE broke through to online spaces that normally avoid politics. The Washington Post noted<\/a> that the moderator of r\/catbongos<\/a>, an 800,000-member subreddit featuring videos of people playing their cats like drums, wrote: \u201cIf you still support Trump\/ICE even slightly, you\u2019re not welcome in this sub.\u201d The post received more than 40,000 Reddit upvotes.<\/p>\n In addition, an older video emerged showing Pretti giving a final salute<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n All these elements combined to make this a rare case \u2013 perhaps even a turning point \u2013 in Trump\u2019s decade-long effort to emulate authoritarian leaders<\/a> who demonstrate their power by requiring citizens to accept lies as truth.<\/p>\n Charlie Sykes<\/a>, a conservative broadcaster and author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, said: \u201cThis 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Sykes added: \u201cStephen Miller<\/a> 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\u2019m interested in trying to figure out why.<\/p>\n \u201cThe 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 \u2013 whether it\u2019s Reddit or websites devoted to rock climbing \u2013 and people were talking about it. It made Stephen Miller\u2019s counter-reality utterly unsustainable.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Rick Wilson<\/a>, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: \u201cI 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\u2019s a very interesting moment and not great for the Trump org.<\/p>\n \u201cI 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\u2019t feel that today.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n 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<\/a>, which begins: \u201cIt was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.\u201d The administration\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Laura Beers<\/a>, author of Orwell\u2019s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the 21st Century, said: \u201cThe administration is saying don\u2019t 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\u2019s writing. It\u2019s very apropos to our current moment.\u201d<\/p>\n But Beers, a history professor at American University<\/a> in Washington, noted that the Pretti case in Minneapolis felt different. \u201cThe thing is that people are willing to go along to get along until they\u2019re not. And maybe, just maybe, this is the moment where people are not, where they\u2019re saying that 2+2=4, and you can\u2019t make me believe otherwise. I hope so at least.\u201d<\/p>\n The mobile phone made all the difference. Walz has encouraged residents<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Such technology did not exist when Orwell was covering the Spanish civil war and saw newspaper reports that bore no relation to the facts<\/a>. Beers added: \u201cThat\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n What is less certain is whether Trump\u2019s 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n