Television is Donald Trump’s thing. It’s how he came to national fame, it’s how he consumes his news, and it informs how he thinks about the world.
How do things look on TV? Armed struggles between American citizens and federal agents in the suburbs of American cities? Protesters being shot and killed on the streets outside a raid? Live news conferences with a Border Patrol commander pouring petrol on the fire? Mass protests?
Clearly, Trump has decided the images coming out of Minneapolis are not what he wants to see. And so Greg Bovino is gone, forced out by the US President’s decision to dispatch his border tsar, Tom Homan, to clean up the mess in Minnesota.
It’s startling to think that the arrival of Homan – a hardline Trump man who shut down the southern border with gusto – might be viewed by anti-ICE activists and Democrats as a positive circuit breaker. But that’s where things stand. And to be fair, Homan is a respected career law enforcement official whose leadership was recognised in a prestigious award from Barack Obama.
Trump’s big backdown in Minneapolis seemed to come quickly, but it had been brewing for a while. He never fully went along with the depiction of Renee Good as a “domestic terrorist”, as she was labelled by senior administration officials on the day she was killed.
Though Trump initially claimed – falsely – that the footage showed Good running over an ICE agent with her car, he equivocated on that conclusion in subsequent interviews. Days later, he said he “understood both sides” and felt terribly about what happened.
Moreover, Trump has been trying to shift the focus on to the violent criminals – “the worst of the worst” – whom ICE is supposed to be detaining and deporting. A New York Times analysis in December found that across ICE’s national operations, about a third of those arrested had no criminal charges or convictions. But in high-profile blitzes in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, that figure rose to about 60 per cent or higher.
That didn’t bode well for those responsible: Bovino, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her close ally Corey Lewandowski. Not when the president wants the messaging – and the imagery – to be something different.
Unlike Trump 1.0, this White House – under chief-of-staff Susie Wiles – wants to keep the show on the road and the personnel intact. It is reluctant to throw anyone under the bus or force them out on a whim. Michael Waltz, the former national security adviser, was quietly moved on after he embarrassed himself with the Signal-gate group chat scandal.
But, without fireworks, the White House has drawn a clear line in the sand on Minneapolis. Trump installed his own man and hit the phones to patch things up with Governor Tim Walz and mayor Jacob Frey. He appears to have acquiesced slightly, with some federal agents set to leave the city within 24 hours, along with Bovino.
And press secretary Karoline Leavitt, speaking from the White House podium, declined to defend Noem or even White House deputy chief-of-staff Stephen Miller in their descriptions of dead nurse Alex Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” or a “would-be assassin” intent on murdering ICE agents.
Trump’s political instincts have proven themselves pretty reliable over the years, and it is clear he could see the politics of this crisis changing rapidly. A slew of Republicans – not just the ones who regularly break with Trump – were alarmed and demanding an investigation. Major conservative media outlets were criticising Noem and saying the status quo could not continue. Even some MAGA podcasters felt things had gone too far.
And Trump reads the polls – even the ones he dismisses as “fake”. On Monday (US time), the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll found Trump’s approval rating on immigration had fallen to a record low of 39 per cent, while 53 per cent of Americans disapproved. The poll was taken from Friday to Sunday, including before and after Pretti’s death.
Where does that leave Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller, and even Vice President J.D. Vance, who kept beating the drums against Pretti and Good and the “domestic terrorists”, even in recent days?
For the most part, they have been following Trump’s lead. They were out making the case, shifting the Overton Window, fighting “the enemy within”, defending the indefensible. Until Trump changed course.
But they should have seen it coming. America First is, at heart, a populist nationalist project led by a populist nationalist; when the country shifts, Trump will eventually adapt.
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Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via X or email.
