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The Tara Palmeri Show
Inside Trump’s PANIC After Alex Pretti Shooting: ICE Turmoil in Minneapolis, Noem Under Fire
00:10:24
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- [00:00]
A
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- [00:17]
B
Welcome back to the Tara Palmieri Show. There is serious turmoil inside of the White House right now with the death of 37 year old Alex Preddy. Trump is reeling. He is furious over how the entire thing was handled. He's angry at Kristi Noem, who's been sidelined. They moved the border patrol agent, Greg Bevino, you know him, with his fascist fashion out of Minnesota. And they have brought Tom Homanin, a former Obama border official, into Minnesota to start handling all this. This is compounded on, on top of an issue that the White House has already been dealing with. Last week, my friend and former colleague Mark Caputo of Axios was on the show and he told me that they were already panicked over diving poll numbers.
- [01:02]
C
If you've seen other polling from like YouGov and independent polling firms, they've just found that a majority of people don't think the shooting is justified. Like, only a third basically think it's. It is. And Trump is way underwater on handling immigration now.
- [01:19]
B
He said the White House felt trapped, that they didn't know what to do. They felt that retreat would go against their never back down, never say sorry ethos. Now, at the time, Mark predicted that the White House would escalate rather than retreat.
- [01:35]
C
The good shooting and then the reaction to it, it's sort of a Chinese fingerprint. The harder you try to get them to pull out, the more you're going to sort of get stuck.
- [01:43]
B
But sadly, since then, things have escalated even more so than Trump probably could have realized. So according to my sources and Mark's, they realize finally that they are in a situation that they need to deal with. There was a man, a disarmed man on all fours who was killed by ICE agents on the street, murdered. Trump needs a way out. He needs to un the situation. As a source told Mark, it's like.
- [02:12]
C
We'Re in sort of the kind of, the more slow withdrawal, at least rhetorically from Trump. So it's sort of a rhetorical retreat that Trump is beating, not necessarily an actual one.
- [02:23]
B
Yeah, you wrote about this idea of withdrawal with honor, peace with honor.
- [02:29]
C
Yes, I was using a Nixon phrase. Yes, it was. I was intentionally channeling Nixon. That's what Nixon was saying in Vietnam, that they were going to do peace with honor.
- [02:38]
B
But Trump needs to look and feel like he Won. What's so fascinating to me about this is that the lies were too much for Trump this time. We all know Trump has no problem lying. But Kristi Noem saying hours after the incident that Preddy was brandishing a gun, even though he clearly wasn't, and the fact that there were so many viral videos that showed it, it was a step too far. This is a violent riot when you have someone showing up with weapons and are using them to assault law enforcement officers. And then there was Stephen Miller, his retelling of events that Preddy was there to massacre the ICE agents. But in Trump's head, the buck doesn't stop with him. Right. It means either rearranging the decks or firing people or making them resign. He had a two hour meeting with Kristi Noem and her deputy, Corey Lewandowski. Stephen Miller, according to Mark, is also getting some heat on background for his idea to use the phrasing that Preddy was out trying to massacre people. But Trump told reporters that he's sticking with Christie.
- [03:42]
C
Does Christie know I'm going to step down? No.
- [03:44]
B
We've heard that before, so we'll see how long that lasts. But he is rearranging the decks. He's sidelining her and her lieutenant. This is a pretty far fall from grace for Kristi Noem. Just think about this. Last week, Mark said that she wanted to run for president on immigration. Now she's facing calls for impeachment from Democrats.
- [04:05]
C
I just don't see Kristi Noem getting fired. Now, Christine wants to step down, that'd be one thing. But also just having witnessed her over a period of time, she's a fighter. She doesn't want to step down because if she want to step down.
- [04:18]
B
But as with everything in Trump world, there's always another layer of drama.
- [04:23]
C
She's annoyed. She has told other people. I've done everything that the President and Stephen Miller have told me and like, and I am now taking the blame for all of this. Now, some of that is true. She, she did sort of toe the White House line. At the same time, you have agency, you're the cabinet secretary. It's a dicey position that she's in.
- [04:46]
B
So Tom Homan is a border czar, and you might remember him because he was caught accepting a bag full of cash. $50,000 in exchange for government contracts. The FBI dropped that case because it was inconvenient, but he's been deployed to Minnesota to start working with state and local leaders to bring down the temperature. And if you know anything about Tom Holman, he was actually an immigration official during the Obama administration.
- [05:12]
C
Yeah, he's it, I think. Yeah, yeah, that's. And that's what he started to do.
- [05:17]
B
By the way, because we know the Trump administration is literally fueled on drama and rivalries. Noem and Homan arrival. So this is pretty bitter for her to see home and have to jump in there and clean up her mess. He doesn't like how performative she is. You know, everything is about the photo op for her. I mean, she wanted a reality show about the ICE raids and, you know, she loves being ICE Barbie. I don't know how else to describe it.
- [05:43]
C
One of the hallmarks of fascism is the infliction of state violence upon your opponents and the enjoyment of inflicting that pain. It's that sort of performative law enforcement cruelty that Homan really dislikes and is partly at the heart of his dispute with Noem and the way in which DHS was run in these immigration matters.
- [06:05]
B
Trump has also booted the US Border Patrol. Greg Bevino, he's going back to California. You remember him. He's the guy who likes to wear the long fascist coat, and he's known for aggressively tangling with protesters.
- [06:19]
C
I have a suspicion that some of the more rational voices in Trump world had really had enough of Bovino stuff. I mean, the guy would show up. He lied under oath in an Illinois case, in a federal case. Surprised he didn't really get sentient for that. Like, he's on video, like, happily chucking, like, gas canisters or tear gas into crowds. Like. Like that stuff we just haven't seen before.
- [06:44]
B
But this is Trump. He picks the most extreme people and he enjoys pushing them to the brink of legality. And then he often has to pay for it in the end, or they do when he's gone too far. It's the price of power in Trump world.
- [06:59]
C
And like in Bondi's case, he wants her to basically indict people with flimsy or almost no evidence. And then when she doesn't do it, story pops up in the Wall Street Journal that he's like, God damn, Bondi not doing her job right. And, you know, you don't want to wind up in that situation. Neither does nomenclature, but, you know, paraphrase King Lear. Heavy lies the crown.
- [07:17]
B
The question is, how does this all end? Mark was kind of wrong last week when he predicted that there would be more escalation. There was in the death of Alex Preddy, and now Trump is looking for retreat. Peace with honor, as Mark said. Or what I would say is retreat without looking like his tail is in between his legs.
- [07:37]
C
The, the trade I see starting to come together next week, which Trump sort of hinted at, Waltz sort of hinted at, is some sort of Minneapolis police presence to help them deal with the crowds. And in return, a more sort of sane way in which to enforce law. What I mean by a sane way to enforce law, I mean not going to target and beating the shit out of the grocery store cart wrangler.
- [08:03]
B
Mark did remind me of one thing that is incredibly disturbing. Trump and his advisors, they look at all of this like it's a war. They fear that if they pull out of Minnesota altogether, they'll lose ground in California and Chicago.
- [08:17]
C
As one of the Trump advisors said in our Axios piece here, what they can't afford to do in the phrase they use was lose Minneapolis. Because if we lose Minneapolis, they said we lose Chicago, we lose Los Angeles. They can't do that sort of domino theory.
- [08:30]
B
But Trump is clearly defeated. No one can deny that Preddy was a good man. He was allowed to have a concealed carry weapon on him. Even the NRA is pushing back on the White House for that. He was an ICU nurse at a veterans hospital. A patriot, 37 years old, just trying to help these women who are being roughed up. What do you think about how the White House is scrambling? Will Trump eventually throw Kristi Noem under the bus? Democrats are already calling for her impeachment and they're threatening to shut down the government this week if they don't see some accountability. I'm curious to hear what you think. Please leave comments. I know this show is a little bit more unconventional, but I actually had technical difficulties where my side of the recording with Mark, who is a very good friend of mine, was lost. So I had to piece it together this way for you to get the juice and the great reporting from Mark in here. I thought it was really important, so we did it. And Dan Schiffmacher, my producer, handled it and I'm very much impressed. I want to thank also my researcher, Abby Baker, who also does my social media. I want to thank, I want to thank Adam Stewart on the graphics and Dan Rosen, my manager. If you like the show, please subscribe Rate share it with all your friends. Leave a comment and of course go to Tara Palmeri.com and sign up for my newsletter, the Red Letter, where you can get all of my exclusive reporting straight to your inbox. And it's a way to support my independent journalism. See you again soon. This is a Monday.com ad the same Monday.com designed for every team. The same Monday.com with built in AI scaling your work from day one. The same Monday.com with an easy and intuitive setup. Go to Monday.com and try it for free.