The Murder of Alex Pretti
I’ve spent a long time inside the documents.
Inside the statements, the press conferences, the executive orders, the “clarifications,” the walk-backs, the denials, the re-denials. Inside the language that pretends to be law while acting like power. That’s what The Trump Files, First Edition is: a chronicle of Trump’s first term. It describes how our country can be moved—inch by inch. It shows how we can end up in a place it swore it would never go.
And then Minneapolis happened.
Mr. Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse who worked at a veteran’s hospital was shot and killed by federal officers in broad daylight. Videos show a woman shoved to the ground by a federal officer. Alex Pretti moves toward her—trying to protect her, trying to help, trying to do what most of us would hope we’d do if we saw someone thrown down in the street. The officer grabs him. He is subdued. His gun is retrieved. And then—according to what the videos appear to show—multiple officers rush to the scene where they kick and punch him while he’s down.
A shot rings out shooting Alex lying on the ground. Then the federal officers open fire.
Ten shots.
When I watched the footage, I didn’t feel the abstract horror of “politics.” I felt the gut-level sickness of recognition. Not because I’ve seen that exact scene before, but because I’ve seen the structure of it: the escalation, the domination, the punishment, the killing—and then the story, delivered from above, to tell us not to trust our own eyes.
The Federal Administration’s Blind Eyes to the Murder of Mr. Alex Pretti
I heard Kristi Noem describe the shooting as defensive. On Saturday afternoon, homeland security secretary Kristi Noem held a press conference in which she declared, definitively, that the shooting of ICU nurse Alex Pretti hours earlier was justified.
“Fearing for his life and for the lives of his fellow officers around him, an agent fired defensive shots,” she said. “This looks like a situation where an individual arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.”
Noem went on to claim this lie: “This individual showed up to impede a law enforcement operation and assaulted our officers,” Noem replied. “They responded according to their training and took action to defend the officer’s life and those of the public around them … This is a violent riot when you have someone showing up with weapons and are using them to assault law enforcement officers.” (George Chidi, The Guardian, January 26, 2026). Please see George Chidi’s other Guardian articles.
The President called the dead man a domestic terrorist. Stephen Miller claimed he was going to massacre agents.
They didn’t just justify the killing. They tried to transform the victim into a monster so the public would stop asking questions.
That is the part we can’t let go.
Because it isn’t only about what happened on that street. It’s about what happens next—inside our heads—if we accept the script.
The second violence: naming the dead
Here is one of the oldest tricks of state power. If you can’t defend what you did, redefine who you did it to.
It’s not enough for the state to say, “We killed him.” It has to say, “We killed that kind of person.”
Domestic terrorist. Radical. Threat. Mass shooter. Monster.
Once the label lands, the moral world rearranges itself. The victim becomes ungrievable. His job becomes irrelevant. His life becomes an asterisk. His death becomes “complicated.” The public becomes a jury forced to choose between two prepackaged verdicts: “heroic agents” or “dangerous civilian.”
But the videos refuse to cooperate with that framing.
In the footage, you don’t see a terrorist. You see a human being reacting to violence. You see a citizen stepping toward a woman who has been shoved to the ground. You see officers pile onto him. You see him on the pavement. You see blows. And then you hear the gunshots.
Even if you believe every officer involved felt afraid—even if you assume panic, adrenaline, confusion—there is still a basic moral question that doesn’t go away:
Why was a man shot ten times after being subdued?
That question is not “anti-cop.” It’s not “pro-crime.” It’s not partisan.
It’s the question a society asks if it wants to remain a society.
This is what The Trump Files has been about all along
I started assembling blog posts on Trump starting in 2015. This work later became the foundation for The Trump Files (2022). I did this for a reason. I wanted to offer my professional observations of the first part of the Trump era. I wanted to show it isn’t a single event. It’s a system of recurring moves. A set of tactics. A method.
And once you see the method, you start seeing it everywhere:
- Create an enemy category.
Immigrants. Protesters. “Antifa.” “Radical left.” Blue cities. Journalists. “Deep state.”
- Send force into public view.
Not quiet arrests. Not careful procedure. Visibility matters. The point is to be seen.
- Escalate, then claim self-defense.
A shove becomes “resisting.” A crowd becomes “rioting.” A citizen intervening becomes “attacking.”
- Deploy language that closes the case.
“Domestic terrorist.” “Massacre.” “Threat.” The words arrive fast, before evidence can settle.
- Punish anyone who questions it.
Doubt becomes disloyalty. Scrutiny becomes “supporting criminals.”
This is how a country is trained. Not trained to think. Trained to obey.
And here’s the thing that should chill every reader: the point isn’t to convince everyone. The point is to convince enough people to create a permission structure for violence.
Is this “state terror”? I don’t use that lightly.
“State terror” is a heavy phrase. It should be. But we can’t keep retiring the vocabulary we need just because it makes people uncomfortable.
Terror, in political terms, isn’t only about bodies. It’s about messages. It’s about intimidation. It’s about shaping behavior by making examples.
So ask yourself: what is the message of Minneapolis?
If you see an officer shove a woman to the ground, don’t intervene.
If you do intervene, you might be beaten.
If you’re beaten, you might be shot.
If you’re shot, you’ll be labeled a terrorist.
And if you question it, you’ll be told you’re on the terrorists’ side.
That is a system designed to make people retreat into private life. To make them stop helping one another. To make them look away.
That is the kind of fear a democracy cannot survive.
Why blue cities?
There’s a reason these flashpoints keep happening in Democratic-led cities.
Blue cities are where immigrants live in large numbers, yes. But they’re also where the political opposition is concentrated. They’re where protest networks are strongest. They’re where lawyers, journalists, and organizers are already in motion.
A crackdown in a rural county disappears. A crackdown in a major metro becomes a national spectacle.
And spectacle is not a side effect. It is the product.
Federal force deployed in blue cities does three things at once:
- It punishes political enemies.
- It provokes conflict that can be used as campaign footage.
- It tests how far the administration can go before institutions push back.
The question is never only “Can we do this?” The question is “Can we do this and get away with it?”
Is it like Nazi Germany?
People reach for 1930s Germany because they recognize the pattern. This includes state violence paired with propaganda. Enemies are labeled as existential threats. Ordinary people are pressured into silence.
The United States is not Nazi Germany. Not yet. We still have courts. We still have elections. We still have journalists and state officials willing to contradict federal narratives. We still have the possibility of accountability. In Minnesota, we elected officials such as the state’s governor and Minneapolis’ mayor. They are speaking out and clearly supporting the people who are out on the streets. These people are witnessing and protesting ICE and Border Control Combatants. But the most important aspect of this resistence in MN is the people who live there.
But here’s the honest warning embedded in history: authoritarianism doesn’t arrive as a fully assembled machine.
It arrives as normalization.
- First, an exception.
- Then another.
- Then a justification.
- Then fatigue.
- Then a shrug.
- Then a new baseline.
A democracy doesn’t die all at once. It dies in the public’s willingness to accept that the state can kill and then simply rename the dead into villains.
What I know for sure
I don’t know every detail of what happened in Minneapolis. I wasn’t there. I’m not pretending to be a forensic investigator. I’m not going to do what officials did and declare the case closed while the evidence is still moving.
But I know this:
If the videos show a subdued man being beaten and then shot, that is not “defensive.”
If the state’s first response is to call the dead a terrorist, that is not transparency.
If the public is pressured to accept violence as normal, that is not security.
That is conditioning.
And that is why I can’t file Minneapolis away as a tragedy, a one-off, a “complicated situation.”
It fits too cleanly into the method.
Minneapolis isn’t only a story about one killing.
It’s a story about the country we’re being told to become.
And the whole reason I wrote The Trump Files is because I refuse to become it quietly. I am now working on a second edition.
Conclusion: What to Watch Next (Accountability Checklist)
If you want to track whether this case gets real scrutiny—or gets buried—watch for these specific developments:
- Full body-cam release (not excerpts): Do we get the complete, unedited footage from all officers on scene?
- Clear timeline of the disarmament: At what exact moment was Alex Pretti’s gun taken, and was he armed when shots were fired?
- Who fired which shots: Names, agencies, and a public accounting of which officers discharged their weapons.
- Independent investigation: Is this handled by a genuinely independent authority (state AG / DOJ Civil Rights / inspector general), or only internal review?
- Autopsy + forensics: Entry wounds, distance/angle analysis, and whether the shooting matches “defensive” claims.
- Radio traffic + dispatch logs: Commands given, threat calls, and whether officers described him as disarmed or restrained.
- Administrative actions: Were officers placed on leave, reassigned, or disciplined—and how quickly?
- Public narrative shifts: Watch whether officials quietly change wording as evidence emerges (“defensive” ? “chaotic” ? “tragic”).
- Civil litigation: Wrongful-death filings often force evidence into daylight through discovery.
- Pattern signals: Do similar operations continue in the same city/state, or does federal leadership pause tactics under scrutiny?
If these items stall or disappear, that’s usually the clearest sign the system is trying to move on before the public can see the full record.