Don’t Make Bovino the Fall Guy for the Violence Trump Long Craved
“Nobody in the White House, including President Trump, wants to see people getting hurt or killed in America’s streets.” So claimed White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday, apparently as part of a strategy to separate the president from the second killing in Minnesota perpetrated by federal immigration agents. The plan also included demoting Greg Bovino, who held the title of Commander At Large at the U.S. Border Patrol, and removing him from his role as head of Minnesota’s mass deportation initiative, “Operation Metro Surge.”
Leavitt is wrong. Trump has a well-documented record of expressing his desire for protesters and immigrants to get hurt, and to get hurt by law enforcement officials.
Bovino’s fall, after a fact-challenged defense of his trigger-happy agents, may provide some short-term schadenfreude. But let’s not allow Trump to get away with scapegoating Bovino. Trump’s bedrock beliefs are few, but they include allowing law enforcement to use violent methods without fear of repercussions, and that protesters and immigrants deserve to be on the receiving end of such violence, either by armed officers or citizen mobs. The president is responsible for cultivating a law enforcement culture over several years that explicitly encouraged the rash actions that led to the deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.
One of Trump’s earliest political salvos, in May 1989, was a full-page newspaper ad that ran in the then-four major New York dailies titled “Bring Back the Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!” Feeding off the angry reaction to the “Central Park Jogger” case—in which a woman was sexually assaulted, and five teenagers were convicted but years later exonerated (after the actual perpetrator confessed)—Trump delivered a 600-word rant claiming society had become too “permissive” to criminals and too hard on police officers. “Let our politicians give back our police department’s power to keep us safe. Unshackle them from the constant chant of ‘police brutality’…”
When Trump briefly pursued the presidency in 2000 as a Reform Party candidate, he published his first political book, The America We Deserve, in which he styled himself as a nonpartisan moderate (and criticized his Reform Party rival Pat Buchanan as a far-right admirer of Adolf Hitler). But he still allowed law enforcement officers wide latitude. Praising the anti-crime policies of then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Trump wrote, “Mayor Giuliani has proved that commonsense policies backed up with a willingness to crack heads makes life better for everyone except the criminals.”
In isolation, these comments could be waved off as hyperbole. But beginning in 2015, with his successful presidential campaign, Trump fleshed out his support of self-serving violence, directing it against protesters and immigrants, and encouraging it from not only cops but mobs.
At a November 2015 rally in Alabama, a protester disrupted Trump’s speech, shouting “black lives matter.” A group of Trump supporters kicked, shoved, and choked him before removing him from the event. The following day, on Fox News, Trump defended the mob: “Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing … This was a very obnoxious guy. He was a troublemaker who was looking to make trouble.”
Ahead of the Iowa caucus in February 2016, a man was arrested for throwing tomatoes at one of his rallies. Soon after, Trump instructed his supporters, “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them … I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.”
Later that month, a protester at a Las Vegas rally was peaceably removed by security. But Trump wished for stronger action, telling the crowd, “We’re not allowed to punch back anymore. I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that, when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher … I’d like to punch him in the face.”
In the Oval Office, Trump’s rhetoric became sharper. At a July 2017 address to a room of law enforcement officials about deporting immigrants—claiming to be focused on criminal gang activity—the new president pleaded for gratuitous brutality: “We’re getting them out anyway, but we’d like to get them out a lot faster … And when you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon—you just see them thrown in, rough—I said, please don’t be too nice. Like when you guys put somebody in the car, and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over … I said, you can take the hand away, okay?”
He also praised Tom Homan—then-director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, now managing Trump’s mass deportation effort under the informal title of “border czar”—for doing “an incredible job in just a short period of time” and observing, “They said he looks very nasty, he looks very mean. I said, that’s what I’m looking for.” Later, in Trump’s trademark rambling style, he cheekily lauded ICE agents for being “rough”: “I saw some photos where Tom’s guys—rough guys. They’re rough. I don’t want to … say it because they’ll say that’s not politically correct. You’re not allowed to have rough people doing this kind of work.”
Trump soon made clear he was not just serving up meaningless glib rhetoric. He was willing to use his executive powers to protect “rough guys.”
Joe Arpaio was sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County for 24 years until he was charged with criminal contempt of court ahead of the 2016 election, and voters finally tossed him out. He had earned a reputation for cruel treatment of prisoners, many of whom were undocumented immigrants. And the criminal charges stemmed from his failure to heed a judicial order to stop racial profiling. In July 2017, Arpaio was found guilty in federal district court. Three weeks later, Arpaio, thanks to his “admirable service” and “life’s work of protecting the public from the scourges of crime and illegal immigration,” was honored with Trump’s very first pardon.
In May 2020, a handcuffed George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer who kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes. Video of the horrific scene sparked huge protests against police brutality in Minneapolis and across the country for several days. Trump, in a May 29 social media post, responded with his most incendiary rhetoric:
I can’t stand back & watch this happen to a great American City, Minneapolis. A total lack of leadership. Either the very weak Radical Left Mayor, Jacob Frey, get his act together and bring the City under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right. These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!
Trump was signaling to law enforcement officials that they could operate with impunity. As reported by The New York Times on May 31, multiple videos captured police officers “using batons, tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets on protesters, bystanders and journalists, often without warning or seemingly unprovoked.” One video showed a New York Police Department truck plowing into a crowd of protesters.
Trump escalated in July with the deployment of armed federal agents to Portland, Oregon, during which several protesters were thrown into unmarked vans, one protester was rendered unconscious by an impact munition, and video captured a Navy veteran asking Department of Homeland Security agents a question, only to be met with batons and tear gas. At one point, the Mayor of Portland was also tear-gassed. Trump used violent images of his crackdown in his 2020 re-election campaign ads, but eventually concluded the operation wasn’t helping him politically and pulled out.
His 2020 defeat didn’t shake his core beliefs. The January 6 riot was, on one hand, an episode of colossal hypocrisy. In 1989, Trump had identified with police officers so intensely that he wanted them “unshackled” from rules that constrained violent behavior. But ahead of the Electoral College vote count that would codify his loss, he had egged on thousands of protesters who proceeded to clash with police. Yet on a deeper level, Trump was consistent; violence was good if it served his interests. As his response to protesters in the 2016 campaign showed, Trump encouraged violence by his supporters against his opponents. It just so happened that on January 6, his opponents were in Congress, and police stood in the way.
During his four years out of office, Trump repeatedly made excuses for the January 6 rioters, while maintaining his extreme “law-and-order” persona. “We will immediately stop all of the pillaging and theft,” he declared during a September 2023 campaign speech, “Very simply: If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.” (In the same speech, he joked about the near-fatal attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul.)
In another rant about shoplifting towards the end of the 2024 campaign, Trump told rallygoers, “We have to let the police do their job. And if they have to be extraordinarily rough … The police want to do it. The border patrol wants to do it … They want to do it. They’re not allowed to do it because the liberal left won’t let them do it … Now if you had one really violent day … One rough hour, and I mean, real rough, the word will get out, and it will end immediately.”
Two weeks later, in a Fox News interview, he suggested he would unleash the military on his political opponents, “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics … It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”
Back in the White House, Trump quickly turned violent rhetoric into policy. In his first week, he pardoned the January 6 rioters, and he pardoned two police officers—one convicted of second-degree murder of a suspect and both of covering up the crime. Last spring, Trump also scrapped reform agreements between the Biden administration Justice Department and nearly two dozen local police forces with histories of violence and racial discrimination, and he shut down civil rights investigations of other police departments. And then came Operation Metro Surge.
Trump got his “one really violent day” and then some. Yet crime did not “end immediately.” What ended were the lives of two innocent protesters at the hands of armed federal agents who had every reason to believe they could use lethal force for any reason. The president had sent a clear message with his policies, his pardons, his many years in office, and on the campaign trail—explicitly encouraging police violence and mob justice. Every day without an independent federal investigation and without any White House cooperation with state officials further proves that Trump will shield federal agents who commit illegal violence on his behalf.
Greg Bovino was no rogue, and neither was Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. They were leading an operation in full accordance with Trump’s principles, wielding an “unshackled” armed force that viewed immigrants and protesters as “bad” and “sick people.” They rushed to brand Good and Pretti as “domestic terrorists” because Trump previously declared the “sick people” are the “radical left lunatics” who deserve to be “very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.” They should not be made the fall guys for executing exactly what Trump has long demanded.
Nor should Democrats and progressive activists shoulder any blame. I understand the political logic being employed by the New York Post and Wall Street Journal editorial boards, prefacing their admonitions for Trump to climb down with digs at Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and even Good and Pretti; they want the ever-petulant Trump to listen so he doesn’t take down the entire Republican Party with his crazed authoritarianism. They’re speaking to an audience of one.
The rest of us—left, right, and center—should see the record clearly. Trump’s own-the-libs rhetoric was never just shtick. It was always violent. It led to violence before, and it led to fatal violence in Minneapolis. It legitimizes the federal government’s unconstitutional use of force to suppress fundamental freedoms. It is anathema to American democracy.
Just as Trump slunk out of Portland, Oregon, in 2020, he may slink out of Minneapolis soon, but the president will not abandon his core beliefs. One way to prevent a recurrence of these horrific events is a thorough investigation that goes all the way to the top. If the Republican-led Congress isn’t willing to use its subpoena powers to do it, then voters in 2026 may elect a Congress that is.
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