This was the moment the tide finally turned on Trump

It feels different this time.

You can sense the Trump administration knows it has finally stepped in it, with its baseless, soulless response to the ICE murder of Alex Pretti, a peaceful protester and legal observer, in Minneapolis last weekend. The administration served up a transparent lie — one so obvious it couldn’t be effectively spun.

Yet they still tried to spin it, assuring us Pretti wasn’t the victim of an execution, that he was a “would-be assassin” (Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s words) who went to a protest to “massacre” law enforcement agents.

That narrative evaporated the moment video of the incident went public. No matter which angle you looked at, the truth was clear: Pretti was pepper-sprayed, manhandled, beaten, disarmed, and then — prone, helpless — had 10 bullets pumped into him.

He was holding a cellphone. Not a gun. They don’t look that much alike.

We soon found out his name, that he was 37, that he was a resident of Minneapolis, a law-abiding citizen of the United States, and an intensive care nurse for the Veterans Administration.

Central casting couldn’t have created a more honorable human being.

Didn’t matter.

As Pretti lay on a cold slab in a Minnesota morgue — as when Renee Nicole Good ended up in the same place, after ICE murdered her earlier this month — the smear machine went into overdrive.

Pretti was brandishing a firearm, we were told. He was determined to inflict maximum damage, the regime lied. The “suspect” reacted violently to the officers, apparatchiks jeered. Those officers feared for their lives and fired defensive shots.

Lie. Lie. Lie. Lie.

Once it was apparent that angle wouldn’t fly, reprehensible Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino and sociopathic Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem resorted to Plan B. No one carries a semi-automatic handgun to a protest, they claimed, unless they have evil intent, and thus deserve to be blown away.

Forget the fact Pretti’s gun was tucked into his waistband, that he never touched it before it was removed from his person, and that he was carrying it in full accordance with Minnesota law.

Therein lay the ultimate hypocrisy. Pretti had a license to possess a handgun in a state that allows concealed carry. This is everything Republicans crow about. They perpetually insist their beloved Second Amendment is at the heart of our rights as Americans.

Even the NRA pushed back at the Trump regime. So did gun activists. Elsewhere, the name Kyle Rittenhouse was trotted out as an example of an outrageous double standard.

Rittenhouse, you may recall, was all of 17 years old and armed with an assault rifle when in August 2020 he arrived at a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and proceeded to shoot three men. Two died but Rittenhouse became a hero of the right, before and after his acquittal for homicide in 2021.

Somehow, among the Trumpists, what was good for Kyle Rittenhouse didn’t apply to Alex Pretti. That helped spark a GOP split. By Monday, it had exploded into a crisis.

Trump’s murderous madness had reached a tipping point. It seemed even the president himself and his propaganda mistress, Karoline Leavitt, were open to some form of investigation of the execution of Pretti — even civil discussions with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey — rather than continuing to back the attempted evidence destruction and coverup.

Administration figures, Republican governors, representatives, and senators were pushing back, saying things may have gone too far. That was code for wanting Noem’s head on a platter, and the carnage to stop. It was at least an admission that the optics were less than stellar.

News came: a reassignment (read: firing) for Bovino; White House border czar Tom Homan called in to clean up the mess.

You know we’ve crossed a surreal divide when the solution to a crisis is a dude forced to unconvincingly deny accepting a bribe from undercover FBI agents — $50,000 cash in a paper bag, no less.

On Tuesday, Trump told reporters he was looking for an “honorable and honest,” impartial investigation.

But then, on Tuesday afternoon, word filtered out that the “Justice” Department had decided there would be no federal investigation (sham or otherwise) into the violation of Pretti’s civil rights by those who fired the fatal shots — only a probe from Customs and Border Protection on whether its officers followed “agency policy” in killing Pretti, and another from DHS centering on Pretti himself and if he broke any laws while being shot dead.

In other words, much of what Trump and Leavitt were spouting was just lip service, and the coverup remained in progress.

When you get right down to it, the real issue is that a group of monsters has been trained to stay on message about how it isn’t the administration breaking down democracy, and that it’s our eyes that are deceiving us.

Now they’re finally being called out.

Lawlessness, fascism, and cruelty are finally being condemned. Not a moment too soon. It took Trump just a year to destroy the government, alienate our allies, upend the world order, terrify the populace and tear to shreds every ideal we hold dear.

For Trump and the GOP, getting slaughtered in November’s midterms should be the least of their concerns. First should be rescuing the republic from the brink.

If the murder of Alex Pretti is the wake-up call it appears it could well be, his slaying will not have been completely in vain.

First on the list of things to be fixed — ended — is the relentless assault on innocent Americans by malevolent, untrained, unyielding, anarchic secret police. This experiment in state-sponsored horror has only fostered fear and hatred. Defund ICE now.

Thankfully, among Republicans, it seems a few sleeping dogs are stirring. Unfortunately, nothing will bring back Renee Good and Alex Pretti. They’re gone. True justice will never be served.

We owe it to them to cleanse their character. Good and Pretti were not murdered because they were “domestic terrorists.” They were said to be lovely, engaged people, not heroes, but far from the demons they are disgracefully said to have been — by the real domestic terrorists.

• Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.