According to the recent Congressional testimony (Dec. 17, 2025) of former special prosecutor Jack Smith, Donald Trump was the “most culpable and most responsible person” for the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riot.
Thus, Trump indirectly caused the deaths of Ashli Babbitt, shot by an African American Capitol police officer; Kevin Greeson, heart attack; Benjamin Philips, stroke; Rosanne Boyland, rushed by the attacking mob; Officer Brian Sicknick, attacked by the mob and dying from two strokes days later; Officer Jeffrey Smith, who was so stressed out by what he witnessed he committed suicide; and two other officers, Kyle DeFreytag and Gunther Hashida, who committed suicide months after the attack.
Trump’s nationwide deployment of both ICE agents and state national guards has resulted in the deaths, thus far, of the 21-year-young woman U.S. Army specialist, Sarah Beckstrom, shot in the head by an angry D.C. resident, and then, on Jan. 7, the ICE shooting death of the single white mother, Renee Nicole Good, in Minneapolis.
This second shooting ironically happened a few blocks from where George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020. Good was legally observing police behavior similar to what the Oakland Black Panther Party did in the 1970s.
The uncompassionate comments by federal authorities stand in stark contrast to Trump’s warning to the Iranian government on U.S. intervention if that government harms protestors in that nation.
Immediately after the shooting death of Good, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem held a news conference and stated, in support of the killing, that Good was a “domestic terrorist.”
Juxtapose her statement with that of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who said that Noem’s comments were “bullshit” in an early cover-up and that ICE should get “the fuck” out of his city. Then Frey firmly stated, “We stand by our immigrant and refugee communities…you have our full support.”
Sadly, the last image of Good shows a smile on her face, as she says to her eventual killer, ICE officer Jonathan Ross, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”
Ross’s last words to a dying Good were “fucking bitch.”
A classic example of a domestic terrorist would be Timothy McVeigh, who on April 19, 1995, bombed the
Alfred P. Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168, mostly children, in the building’s daycare center.
Noem’s attempt to legitimize the obvious murder of a single mother of three reminds me of Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice in Wonderland and the oral interchange between Alice and Humpty Dumpty in which Alice suggests that words have an objective meaning and Humpty Dumpty replies, “When I use a word…it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
That is what Noem’s words aimed to do, which was to characterize the victim in the worst sort of way. However, to have credibility in what you say, there must be some internal consistency of thought.
To this exact point, most Americans now see through the falsehoods spewed by Trump, Noem and other administration officials, for example, killing alleged Venezuelan drug boat traffickers for regime change and oil.
This semantic conundrum was explained by the womanist scholar, Hazel Carby, who could have been referring to Trump and his MAGA loyalists in noting that when they speak, they do not speak to “reflect or represent a reality but to have their words disguise or mystify objective social relations.” This situation creates an Orwellian nightmare of not believing your eyes and ears.
Renee Nicole Good’s concern, compassion and activism on behalf of the have-nots might have partly derived from her living within Black realities of being the “wretched of the earth.” And with her death per the needless confrontational ICE deployment, Trump has violated a cardinal rule of the hood, which is “Don’t start no mess, Won’t be mess.”
