The Defining Moment Of Trump’s Presidency Has Arrived. The Path Forward Is Obvious.

There is no doubt that the single most consequential week of Donald Trump’s second term, to this point, is now underway. The president must decide — in the face of a highly coordinated and well-funded domestic terror campaign by the enemies of civilization — to choose one of two options. He can fulfill his constitutional obligation as the leader of the Executive Branch to enforce the law by continuing to deport illegal aliens and by dismantling left-wing organizations that are laundering taxpayer money to fund a violent insurrection. Or, in the alternative, the president can surrender. He can concede that, in America, the government does not have a monopoly on the use of force. He can revert the United States to a “state of nature.” He can suspend immigration enforcement in Minneapolis. He can give the fraudulent NGOs and the fake “legal observers” a free pass, after weeks of harassing and assaulting federal agents (in addition to private citizens who happen to “look like” federal agents). And in turn, if he chooses that path, the president will guarantee more violence and lawlessness than this country has ever seen in recent history. And it will be, for all intents and purposes, the end of his presidency and the country. 

In a moment, we’ll cover the shooting of Alex Pretti, and how he ended up dying in front of yet another “cultural lear-ing center” for foreigners in Minneapolis, which appears to have at least one fraudulent business on every block.

But first, I want you to look at this photo.

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

It was taken in May of 1970, just days after National Guardsmen opened fire on demonstrators at Kent State University during a Vietnam War protest, killing several students. The Guardsmen said their lives were in danger. Of course, the mob — which had been pelting the Guardsmen with rocks — disagreed.

The photo shows a line of transit buses, parked bumper to bumper around the White House, totally encircling the building. Nixon’s advisers and the Secret Service decided that, because of the Kent State shooting and the resulting outrage, there was a real chance that the White House would soon be overrun by Left-wing agitators. So they placed buses all around the white house to block the rioters, and stationed the 82nd Airborne next door to the White House in case the mob breached the perimeter. Meanwhile, all over the country, there was a massive student strike — the largest in U.S. history — to protest the shooting.

Howard Ruffner/Getty Images

At the time, polls showed most Americans supported the National Guard and didn’t agree with the Left’s narrative about Kent State. But the mob still loomed very large in Washington. They made the president feel unsafe in the single most secure building in the entire world. But Nixon didn’t back down. He didn’t apologize. In fact, according to White House tapes, Nixon said, “You know what stops them? Kill a few… Didn’t it have one hell of an effect, the Kent State thing?”

Here’s what happened next.

Credit: Reddit/McGovernQ

Nixon won re-election in a landslide. He took 49 states. He won a larger share of the popular vote than any Republican in history.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2020. Instead of encircling the White House with transit buses, the Secret Service rushed Donald Trump to an underground bunker, as mobs of BLM rioters torched the area and assaulted police officers.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

The Trump administration went easy on these rioters. That’s an objective fact. No one was arrested for torching the church directly across from the White House. I repeat, no one was arrested for lighting St. John’s church on fire. There was no January 6-style dragnet. There wasn’t a dragnet at all.

Meanwhile, the DOJ dropped most of the charges against Antifa radicals who were attacking federal courthouses every night. Something like 90% of the terrorists who besieged the courthouse in Portland had their cases dropped.

The result? Joe Biden became president. He began a four-year campaign to eliminate the civil liberties of conservatives at scale — starting with people who refused the experimental COVID shot, along with peaceful political demonstrators and pro-life activists. He also oversaw an unprecedented effort to imprison, if not assassinate, his leading political opponent.

There was very good reason to believe, after all of this recent history, that the second Trump administration would adopt Nixon’s approach in the face of Left-wing agitators and criminals. Don’t give them what they want. Don’t cower in the face of their violence and threats. Continue to enforce the law, without apology — because without laws, we don’t have a country. And if some Leftists get themselves killed on purpose, we shouldn’t change a single thing. That’s the approach voters want to see. And more importantly, it’s the approach that will prevent the United States from descending into anarchy.

As of today, though, there are many signs that the new Trump administration is planning to repeat the first Trump administration’s performance during the BLM riots. Greg Bovino, the border patrol chief who’s a regular fixture on the front lines of deportation raids — even though he knows Leftists want to kill him — is reportedly being ordered to leave Minneapolis. Effectively, he’s being fired, according to various reports, including a story in the Atlantic, and reporting from the independent journalist Nick Sortor.

The DOJ immediately disputed those reports. And late last night, Sortor offered an update. He stated that Donald Trump didn’t give this order to remove Bovino.

Sortor wrote, “I can confirm President Trump was NOT aware of the prior decision to remove Greg Bovino from his role as Commander Op at Large of the U.S. Border Patrol Nor was Secretary Noem. Trump and Noem FULLY BACK Mr. Bovino. And someone ‘down the food chain’—as we’ll say—will have a rough week.”

Whether that’s true or not — it could be a cover story after the administration saw the backlash on social media — it really doesn’t matter. This is a major blunder, from a PR standpoint and a strategic standpoint, and the administration can’t allow anything like this to happen again. And Bovino needs to remain in full command in Minneapolis.

As if to emphasize that point, the reports that Bovino was being fired were immediately celebrated by open-borders Marxists and their leaders in the Democrat Party.

Gavin Newsom, for example, posted this message: “Gestapo Greg is out. Keep the pressure up. It’s working.”

It goes without saying that, if any decision by this administration produces that kind of response from Gavin Newsom, then it was the wrong decision. Period. There doesn’t really need to be any more discussion. Any policy decision that emboldens an anti-American fraudster and degenerate like Gavin Newsom, and that encourages domestic terrorists in the Democrat Party, should be reversed immediately.

But just in case there’s any doubt on that point, let’s talk about why Greg Bovino was reportedly demoted. Let’s discuss the incident that has led many self-described “conservatives” to decide that, actually, the rule of law should be suspended in Minneapolis.

On Saturday morning, according to reporting from the investigative journalist Asra Nomani, a member of the “rapid response” anti-ICE Signal chats in Minneapolis — the same chats that we infiltrated a week ago, that are connected to NGOs that receive taxpayer money — called for agitators to rush to Glam Doll Donuts on Nicollet Avenue. The individual posted a video of federal agents attempting to enter the donut shop. Then, at 8:53 AM local time, another member of the Signal group wrote, “Backup needed at the Black Forest Inn parking lot on Nicollet Ave just south of 26th Street. Multiple vehicles with many agents appear to be staging there,” the alert continued. “One confirmed ICE vehicle seen was a maroon Dodge Durango [plate number], but it has driven away northbound on Nicollet.”

Within 15 minutes, 37-year-old Alex Pretti arrived on scene. Here’s what happened next.

Credit: Drop Site News/X.com/YouTube.com

Alex Pretti stands in the middle of the street. He starts directing traffic through the road, without any kind of authorization whatsoever. Along with a woman, he stands in the middle of the street, unlawfully, as Border Patrol agents try to clear the roadway.

Then a Border Patrol agent pushes the woman away. At that point, Alex Pretti commits several serious felonies. He runs directly into the path of the Border Patrol agent and physically tries to separate the agent from the woman.

Here’s the freeze-frame showing the precise moment that Pretti does exactly what Leftists train their agitators to do. They call it “de-arresting” someone.

Screenshot: X/Twitter

There is no plausible argument, at this point, that Pretti is a mere “legal observer” or peaceful protestor. He’s a criminal who appears to believe that he has lawful authority, and the police don’t.

In addition to obstruction, this behavior constitutes assault on a federal agent. And Pretti is committing these felonies while carrying a firearm, which makes the crime even more serious.

We’re talking about more than a decade in prison, easily.

Watch:

Oh the picture isn’t enough?

Here’s Pretti’s shove INITIATING the physical confrontation with a federal agent on repeat

“But he was helping the woman!”

Yeah that means f**k-all here, bud, she’s also impeding pic.twitter.com/M5I0mRUwCN

— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) January 25, 2026

Credit: @Oilfield_Rando/X.com

After Pretti makes this decision, an officer pepper-sprays him, and several other officers try to take him down. Now he clearly resists arrest and appears to assault the woman — probably because he’s under the influence of the tear gas, and can’t see exactly what’s going on. Whatever the case, Pretti is now committing even more federal crimes. 

As officers attempt to arrest Pretti, one agent appears to take a firearm from Pretti’s holster in order to secure it.

Watch:

Federal agents in Minneapolis wrestled Alex Pretti to the ground and secured the handgun he was carrying moments before shooting him multiple times, according to a Washington Post analysis of video footage.

Read more: https://t.co/gs55sapKJH pic.twitter.com/0LwulTgqLy

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) January 25, 2026

Credit: @washingtonpost/X.com

Within seconds, someone shouts “Gun!”, one shot rings out — possibly from an accidental discharge of Pretti’s gun — and then there are many more shots, all of them coming from Border Patrol. Pretti is killed. An officer wonders aloud where the gun is before realizing that Pretti had already been disarmed.

Without knowing all of the facts about which gun was fired — an investigation is obviously underway — we can still come to some basic conclusions. The first conclusion is that Alex Pretti was part of an organized campaign to illegally obstruct law enforcement operations on behalf of open-borders communists who want to destroy the United States. He was a domestic terrorist, dressed in the same color scheme as Border Patrol agents, who did exactly what he set out to do: He blocked federal agents from carrying out the will of the voters, and from performing the job they’re obligated to do. 

The second conclusion we can draw is that the officers were legally justified in shooting Pretti. That’s because they clearly believed that he was either shooting at them or was about to shoot at them. And that belief was objectively reasonable, whether or not Pretti was indeed armed at the moment he was shot. 

If it’s true that his gun was accidentally discharged after an agent disarmed Pretti — making the other officers believe they were under fire — then those officers were entitled to use lethal force against him. Under the law, the relevant question is not whether Pretti was actually a lethal threat to the officers. The relevant question is whether the officers believed he was a lethal threat to them, and whether that belief was objectively reasonable given the information the officers had at that moment. They had a split second to respond to a gunshot that they believed came from Pretti, whose holster was empty. And they weren’t aware that he had been fully disarmed at that point.

Now, you might say, “Well, it’s the agents’ job to communicate the fact he had been disarmed.” But the problem is that we’re talking about a chaotic situation that unfolded in a matter of seconds, with people screaming and blowing whistles nonstop, in a mayhem that’s been deliberately orchestrated by Leftists to cause maximum confusion for law enforcement. And frankly, even the agent who took Pretti’s gun didn’t know that he had been fully disarmed. He might have more than one gun. He certainly had more than one magazine.

This is the reason why we have laws against obstructing federal officers, and laws against carrying guns while you’re committing felonies, and laws against blocking traffic and resisting arrest. The more felonies you commit, the more you raise the risk of losing your life, or killing someone else. The more people upend the rule of law, and start acting like they can do whatever they want, the more likely it becomes that people will die in preventable, inadvertent ways. The point of law is to maintain order. Without law, you have chaos. And in chaotic situations, people die. And it is the people who are attempting to undermine the rule of law — people like Alex Pretti — who are to blame. It is not the fault of the people trying reestablish and enforce the law.

With that in mind, here’s a video that should’ve received far more attention than it has. It depicts an independent journalist named Hailey West, being chased around the streets of Minneapolis by a mob of Leftists pretending to be police officers.

They even demand to see her papers.

Watch:

????Minneapolis, MN

Yesterday, while driving, we were followed by multiple vehicles for over an hour. We were told that we came up in the local ICE Watch group’s “ICE Database”.

You can hear us confirm to them multiple times that we are NOT ICE.

At one point they asked for our… pic.twitter.com/ch3V6MZ3kV

— Hailey (@haileyywest) January 24, 2026

Credit: @haileyyywest/X.com

This video is infinitely more important than any of the footage of the communist nurse committing ten different felonies before being shot to death. That’s because, unlike the communist nurse, the woman didn’t do anything wrong.

It may as well be a scene from Somalia. Drive around any dysfunctional African country, and there’s a good chance you’ll be stopped by criminals who will shake you down. They’ll act like law enforcement, without any legal authority whatsoever. This is a defining characteristic of the third world: The state doesn’t have a monopoly on violence. The mob can harass you at will. 

They can demand to see your identification. They can berate you and run you off the road, and no one will do anything about it.

When an American city falls like this, the Executive Branch must take immediate action to restore order. But as far as I can tell, no one in the administration is even talking about this footage — or the footage from the hotel in Minneapolis on Sunday night, where a lone federal agent tried to hold off a mob that ransacked the lobby. Somehow, none of this registers with the White House. Instead, the administration appears to be paying attention to podcasters and the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

So let’s start with the podcaster Dave Smith, who calls himself a comedian not because he tells jokes, but because comedians have plausible deniability when they say incredibly stupid things, which Dave Smith does all the time. Fake comedians can just say “I was joking” or “You mad bro?” when they’re called out. 

So with that in mind, here’s Dave Smith’s latest insight:

I’m an immigration restrictionist. I believe that we have the right to remove any and all people who entered our country illegally. Also, ICE is out of fucking control. A bunch of pussies, drunk on power going around intentionally escalating violent interactions and intimidating US citizens. They create these tragic situations and after this gigantic show of force, they won’t deport a fraction of the illegals who entered under Biden. This is simply not worth it.

So he’s in favor of restricting immigration and deporting illegal aliens, but he’s not in favor of the people who are actually doing that, because they’re “drunk on power” and “creating dangerous situations.” This is a total inversion of reality, as documented by literally every video coming from Minneapolis. In every case, Leftist rioters are the ones who are deliberately creating dangerous situations and “escalating interactions” by preventing ICE from doing its job. As we discussed before, there were no problems with ICE raids during the Obama administration. And as you may have noticed, all of this ICE-related drama is coming out of Minneapolis lately. That’s where the shootings are. (It’s also where the George Floyd hoax originated.) It’s almost as if Minneapolis is a hotbed of anti-American terrorism, where they learned long ago that self-described conservatives will fold under the slightest bit of pressure. It’s almost as if they learned how to manufacture hoaxes in order to achieve their goals, and no one has ever called them out on it.

To restate Dave Smith’s post another way, as I did on X: This ICE situation is really complex. My take is more nuanced, you see. I want our immigration laws to be enforced but I just want them to do it without using any force, and without anyone ever getting hurt, and without anything sad or upsetting happening ever, and if the people we’re trying to deport don’t want to be deported, or if liberal activists don’t want us to deport them, then obviously in that case we shouldn’t do it, but I’m totally a conservative on the issue, unless people get really mad at me then never mind please don’t yell I’m sorry.

When I responded to Dave Smith’s post by pointing out very specifically why it was so retarded, he came back with this response, which was extremely, painfully predictable.

Oh now the Israeli wire guy addresses me? It’s always when they think I’m on the wrong side of a popular right wing issue. Come have a conversation. We’ll see who gets embarrassed. Check with your boss to see if you’re allowed.

Ah, yes, Israel. Of course.

90s kids are familiar with the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, where you take any actor and connect him to another actor that they starred in a film with, and then connect that actor to another one, until you get to Kevin Bacon. The point is that it should only take six connections or fewer until you get to Kevin Bacon, because he’s been in a lot of movies. Well, guys like Dave play the same game, except it’s One Degree of Israel. Any issue will be connected, not through six moves, but just by one move, directly to Israel. 

I also love how he is indignant that only now do I address him, a theme he has returned to several times when responding to me while also not actually responding to my points. He’s upset that I haven’t “addressed him” before. He really sees himself as this figure of great consequence, whom the rest of us are obligated to address. But his entire public career consists of talking about Israel. I like to focus on my own country, which makes his commentary, to me, almost always irrelevant, incredibly boring, and redundant. And when he isn’t talking about Israel — for those brief moments when they arise — he’s revealing himself to be a standard issue sh*tlib.

But to be fair to Dave Smith, there are a lot of self-described conservatives who are caving in exactly the same way.

Here’s Jonah Goldberg, for example. This is his response when asked why activists are accusing Border Patrol of wrongdoing.

Because after watching the video, people saw that they shot him only after disarming him? Because he was directing traffic until the agents shoved a woman to the ground and he went over to assist? Because he never drew the weapon and it’s not illegal to legally carry a gun?

So Goldberg states that Pretti was “assisting” the woman. Even though the video shows that Pretti clearly moved in front of the officer to prevent him from arresting the woman, and even made contact with the officer, we’re just supposed to assume that he was lending a helping hand to a damsel in distress.

And then there’s the claim that Pretti was “directing traffic,” as if that’s a completely normal thing for a random guy to do. Did Border Patrol authorize Pretti to stand in the middle of the road and “direct traffic” directly through a scene they were trying to control? To Jonah Goldberg, that’s not a federal crime. It’s the most normal thing in the world. Who among us doesn’t rush towards federal agents at 9:00 AM on a Saturday morning, in order to “direct traffic” while armed with a handgun and two spare magazines?

For their part, the Wall Street Journal Editorial board (along with the New York Post) wasn’t any better. 

Here’s the Journal’s take.

The Trump Administration spin on this simply isn’t believable. Stephen Miller, the political architect of the mass deportation policy, called Pretti a ‘domestic terrorist.’ He was a nurse without a criminal record. He was carrying his phone. To hear the ardent gun-rights advocates of the Trump Administration claim he had malicious intentions because he carried a concealed weapon is bizarre. Pretti made a tragic mistake by interfering with ICE agents, but that warranted arrest, not a death sentence. … Trump would be wise to pause ICE enforcement in the Twin Cities to ease tensions and consider a less provocative strategy. Yes, many on the left would conclude that their civil disobedience has paid off. But Mr. Trump can still pursue enforcement with a smaller force and a strategy aimed at criminals, not at hotel maids and gardeners.

To be clear, the reason we’re calling Pretti a “domestic terrorist” is that he was a domestic terrorist. He was part of an organized group of activists who explicitly intend to violently interfere with federal law enforcement in order to affect national policy. We showed you one of their handbooks last week. They regularly call 911 and claim that ICE is kidnapping them, in order to provoke the Minneapolis police department to shoot ICE agents. They relay license plate numbers to one another so that they can stalk and harass innocent people through the streets, including law enforcement officers. They try to “de-arrest” people by physically surrounding ICE agents. That’s what we’re seeing in Minneapolis. There’s no debate about it; we have the Signal chats, and it’s all on video. 

Just the other day, the independent journalist Cam Higby posted this video as he was driving through the streets of Minneapolis. He also infiltrated the anti-ICE signal chats and joined one of their “dispatch calls.” In real-time, as he was being followed by these lunatics, he was listening to their “scanner traffic” as they relayed his location to other domestic terrorists. 

Watch:

???????? MINNEAPOLIS SIGNAL INFILTRATED

Here is a recording of protestors actively tailing the vehicle I was in, labeling me as ICE and instructing “commuters” (ICE chasers) to follow me. pic.twitter.com/idjKz5auLZ

— Cam Higby ???????? (@camhigby) January 24, 2026

Credit: @camhigby/X.com

This is not how a “protest movement” operates. This isn’t how Republicans acted on January 6, either. This is not a one-off event. This is not a rag-tag group of unaffiliated demonstrators. This is a highly coordinated campaign — which, as we discussed a couple of weeks ago, when we first infiltrated these Signal chats, is funded via NGOs and Minnesota taxpayers. And the point of this campaign is to interfere with the civil liberties of American citizens and with the enforcement of immigration law. This is terrorism.

The Wall Street Journal knows that, if he relents and pulls ICE back, then there will be even more terrorism. They actually admit that, in their editorial. What the Journal won’t admit is that, in the end, they want terrorism to take place. They see it as a way to weaken and ultimately get rid of Trump and the MAGA movement. They want a more mainstream, less populist Republican to take over in a few years. And therefore, whatever hurts Trump now, they’re fine with.

The most amusing spectacle has been all of the allegedly “most based,” alleged far-Right influencers who’ve gone full leftist cuckold on this issue. Jake Shields, for example, posted: “I supported Kyle Rittenhouse being armed at a BLM riot, so it would be hypocritical If I opposed a leftist doing the same. Laws need to apply equally to all Americans.”

The only problem here is that Rittenhouse was not interfering with, sabotaging, obstructing, or resisting law enforcement in any way. The only reason he was on the scene is precisely because law enforcement was nowhere in sight, refusing to do their jobs. Rittenhouse and Alex Pretti are not only not alike, but are diametric opposites. And yet guys like Jake Shields — super based right-wingers — are taking the side of the open borders communists. Keep in mind that these guys have spent the last two or three years talking about how cool Hitler is. They run around edge lording, trying to impress and scandalize us with their Hitler fan-girling, and then next thing you know they’re telling us that ICE is being too aggressive, and it wasn’t very nice for Trump to kidnap Maduro, or plot to take Greenland.

Yes, Hitler is cool, but using any kind of force or violence to simply protect our borders and enforce our immigration laws is too far, man. Make sense of that, if you can. 

I supported Kyle Rittenhouse being armed at a BLM riot so it would be hypocritical If I opposed a leftist doing the same

Laws need to apply equally to all Americans https://t.co/0iIPiIh4M8

— Jake Shields (@jakeshieldsajj) January 25, 2026

Credit: @jakeshieldsajj/X.com

The appropriate response to all of this nonsense — and the one Trump must immediately take — is to send thousands more federal agents to Minneapolis. He should also invoke the Insurrection Act and send in the military. The lawlessness is so pervasive that we have no other choice. As various commentators noted — including the account “Data Republican” — the street where Pretti died appears to be a hotbed of fraud, all by itself. You can’t videotape a random street corner in Minneapolis without uncovering a massive fraud scheme. Specifically, Nicollet Street in Minneapolis is home to at least three day care centers — including one owned by the man who started the infamous “Quality Learing Center” that was unearthed by Nic Shirley. Additionally, there are about ten different businesses at the address where Pretti died, including an organization that received more than a million dollars in government grants, with the stated goal of, “Housing program is the largest program that provide rent and utilities.”

Are all of those businesses legitimate? As of now, no one in Minneapolis, or the federal government, can answer that question. And if the Left succeeds in forcing the federal government out of Minneapolis with their campaign of domestic terrorism, we’ll never get the answer. We’ll never shut down the hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud that takes place in Minneapolis every year, at our expense. We’ll never reclaim our national sovereignty. And no American citizen — regardless of where he lives — will have any reason to believe that the rule of law exists in this country. 

That is the worst possible outcome. Any resolution to the Minnesota situation that does not include mass arrests of the leftist agitators and mass deportations of the illegals will be a total failure for the Trump administration and will only guarantee more and worse chaos in the future.

Around midnight last night, Minneapolis police finally began arresting rioters outside of a hotel housing ICE agents. That could be a sign that the Trump administration is applying the necessary pressure. Or it could be a temporary victory. At this point, it’s too early to say. Whatever the case, we don’t need to hear about “good conversations” that Trump is having with Jacob Frey and Tim Walz. We need to see Jacob Frey and Tim Walz in leg irons. We need to treat open-borders communists who conspire to interfere with federal law enforcement like the domestic terrorists they are. That was the lesson of the first Trump administration. We simply can’t afford to learn it the hard way again.