Trump and his vile liars forget one vital thing about the ICE victim they smear

One of the most disturbing things about the Trump administration’s response to the shooting death of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis isn’t just that they’re lying. It’s how easy the lying seems to be. It starts at the top, with the liar-in-chief, and trickles down through a dishonest and delusional cabinet.

They didn’t hesitate. They didn’t hedge. They didn’t wait for the facts. One wonders if they even watched the video evidence, because they contradicted it without blinking. Within hours, officials confidently described Good as a “domestic terrorist” who used her vehicle as a “weapon.”

Trump and his allies are inventing threats that simply do not appear in the footage all Americans can watch. The certainty with which they spew these fabrications tells you something important: they believe this strategy works. And that belief has less to do with the facts than with who Renee Good was.

She wasn’t famous. She didn’t hold office. She wasn’t wealthy or politically connected. She didn’t have a MAGA bumper sticker on her SUV.

She was a woman — that’s important. She was a mom, a neighbor, a queer woman married to another woman. She was living an ordinary suburban life. She was like millions of women across this country.

Good had no institutional power. No connections. She was harmed by the state, by Trump’s Gestapo, and her life was immediately sexualized, and flattened into justification. When armed ICE agents — all men — surrounded her car, one trying to open the door, she was terrified in a way most can easily imagine. She did what anyone would do: she tried to get away.

She had undoubtedly heard stories about rogue male ICE agents, how many have no law enforcement experience. How many can barely read or write. Fear had been planted. And that fear, entirely unnecessary, deliberately cultivated, sealed her fate.

After her death, Trump and his fellow misogynists turned that fear into “aggression.” Her confusion became “instability.” Her ordinariness became the excuse. The killing itself was treated as less important than protecting the thuggish authorities who carried it out.

That pattern explains why this administration dug in so quickly and so deeply. Lying about Renée Good was easy. It came from muscle memory. JD Vance said it was a “tragedy of her own making.” Trump said, “She behaved horribly.” Kristi Noem said, “She rammed [ICE agents] with her vehicle.” Notice the prevalent use of the female pronouns.

This response fits a posture toward women that runs through Trumpworld. Vance has built a political identity around belittling women’s judgment and independence. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has denied multiple allegations from women, including sexual assault. This week he announced a review of women’s role in combat, having said they don’t belong there.

As for Trump, he has been accused by numerous women of sexual assault and was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming journalist E. Jean Carroll. He has spent years smearing women who challenge him as “liars,” “nasty,” “pigs,” “dogs,” “slobs,” and “disgusting animals.”

The women in his administration offer no counterweight. Noem has gone after Good more aggressively than many male counterparts, showing little interest in advocating for women harmed by brutish agents of the state. She has chosen to posture as one of the guys in Trump’s hyper-masculine administration.

In this worldview, women are denied political agency. They are treated as variables to be managed, controlled, or erased.

Add queerness to the picture, and the erasure becomes even easier. The right has spent years portraying queer people, especially the trans community, as threats, criminals, or accessories to violence. Just look what happened after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, when right-wing meda like the New York Post twisted itself in knots trying to make a trans woman an accomplice.

Renée Good’s family? It was almost immediately scrubbed from the official narrative, replaced with a caricature meant to frighten and distract: a wild, antifa-like woman, driving ferociously, hell-bent on killing ICE agents.

The administration didn’t just lie about what happened. It erased who she was.

But there’s one thing they are forgetting: women are watching.

Women are no niche constituency. They are the largest and most decisive voting bloc. In recent elections, women, especially suburban women and mothers, have moved away from Trump-aligned politics, driven less by policy disagreements than by disgust with the cruelty, chaos, and impunity that define this movement.

Women are watching that video. They are reading about Renee Good. They do not see a “domestic terrorist” using her SUV as a weapon. They see someone like themselves. Someone ordinary. Someone who thought that being a law-abiding citizen, a parent, a neighbor, a friend — a soccer mom — would offer at least minimal protection from being lied about after death.

What they see instead is a government telling them not to believe their own eyes, and doing so with absolute confidence. But think of any mother you know. Think of your own mom. Think of your spouse. Women can spot a lie a mile away.

Tracking Trump’s lies used to feel like a never-ending game. It involved tallying exaggerations, fact-checking absurdities. But this is something else. This is lying as domination. It’s sinister. It’s inhumane. It’s vulgar. It’s dangerous. And it involves a human being who meant no harm. A human being who was murdered.

It is unforgivable.

Tragically, Renee Good’s death may not be remembered as the worst abuse of power in this era, or even the worst lie this administration tells. That alone is terrifying. Trump, Noem, Vance — none will show remorse. They will never admit wrongdoing. They will never apologize. Especially not to a woman.

Like every other woman-hater, they will only dig deeper.

But perhaps Renee Good’s death will be remembered as something else. Just maybe, it will be the moment when too many Americans, especially women, realized this administration believes some lives are small enough to lie about, and assumes no one would care.

That may be their biggest mistake.

• John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”