What MAGA Really Thinks of the Second Amendment

On January 23, 2016, Donald Trump notoriously declared, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” That statement was understood at the time as a metaphorical expression of the depth of Republican voters’ commitment to him. Ten years and one day later, his administration’s agents shot a disarmed man on the street in full view of the public. Perhaps we should have taken him not only seriously but also literally.

The dynamic Trump observed is that he had created a bond with his supporters that no outside facts could break, even something as blatant as a cold-blooded killing on an American street. And that is the nub of the crisis into which we have plunged over the past decade. All politicians spin and distort to some extent, of course. Trump’s innovation was to grasp that, because the conservative movement had trained its devotees to ignore mainstream media and rely completely on information supplied by its own loyalists, his ability to control his supporters’ perceptions effectively had no limit. And because his supporters would believe anything, he could do anything.

After Customs and Border Patrol agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis yesterday, the Trump administration immediately branded him a “domestic terrorist.” The specific allegation it employed to support this hyperbolic charge was that, because Pretti was carrying a firearm while filming and then clashing with agents, he intended to massacre federal officers. Even if that were true, it still would not remotely justify the fact that, according to multiple videos of the incident, agents shot Pretti after they had pinned him to the sidewalk and disarmed him.

Until very recently, conservative rhetoric has valorized gun ownership as a bulwark against tyrannical government, to the point of fetishization. Conservatives defended Kyle Rittenhouse as a hero for bringing a rifle to a chaotic protest in Wisconsin during the summer of 2020, as well as armed bands of protesters who marched into state capitol buildings during the COVID lockdowns.

[Tyler Austin Harper: Minneapolis is a Second Amendment wake-up call]

For Trumpists to infer homicidal intent from the exercise of a right they have fetishized is a Fifth Avenue–level mental reversal. Their view of the Second Amendment turns out to be no different from their view of the First: one whose protections apply exclusively to themselves.

The administration’s immediate use of the terrorist label should be understood not just as a hyperbolic accusation of intent, but as an umbrella term it applies to political opposition generally. “There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has written. “It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”

Miller wrote that message in October. His definition of terrorism does not require imputing specific motives to protesters who own a gun or, like Renee Nicole Good, drive a car. He has called forth state power on a scale that is coming to resemble the piecemeal extension of martial law. The more abusive the power of the state, the more angry people will become, which the administration then uses as a pretext to crack down harder.

The administration’s allies, not all of whom wish to directly endorse summary executions, have played along with his logic, treating protesters’ reaction to the crackdown as though it were its cause.

“For months, radical progressive politicians like Tim Walz have incited violence against law enforcement officers who are simply trying to do their jobs,” the National Rifle Association wrote in a statement yesterday. “Unsurprisingly, these calls to dangerously interject oneself into legitimate law-enforcement activities have ended in violence, tragically resulting in injuries and fatalities.”

[Read: The truth about ICE’s recruiting push]

“The Left is in a cycle of constant self-radicalization—the resistance to ICE creates the predicate for tragedies that are used to justify ever-more resistance and the demand for the de-facto nullification of federal immigration law in Minneapolis,” National Review’s editor in chief, Rich Lowry, wrote on X.

In reality, Minnesotans are taking to the streets to warn passersby of ICE’s actions and to record them because, as multiple reporters have documented, federal immigration agents appear to be routinely violating the law. Democratic Party leaders in the state have urged residents to record activity in order to produce a record of these acts. That is why Pretti was holding his phone, not his gun, when he intervened to protect a woman being tear-gassed by CBP agents, who then killed him.

The phone, not the gun, is the weapon the administration fears. The phone produces evidence of its agents’ misconduct, which is what the administration seems determined to destroy. Officials’ insistence that citizens who record agents are provoking violent retribution is a justification for what is becoming a very literal war on truth.

If Trump himself, and not just one of his agents, actually shot somebody on the street, we can guess what would happen. He would call the victim a terrorist. His allies would say the victim had provoked their own death and blame Democrats for inciting the violence. A decade ago, Trump intuited at some level that the end point of his power to command the minds of his followers would be a killing on the street. What was once seen as a joke has attained the status of a prophecy.