Trump’s war on the truth
- Rich Moniak
- Jan 30
- 3 min read
By Rich Moniak
Following the killing of Alex Pretti last Saturday, and the deviant attempt by members of the Trump administration to label him a domestic terrorist, Sen. Lisa Murkowski justifiably called on Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Kristi Noem to step down. It’s the right thing to do. But treating the symptom of the disease won’t put an end to the president’s war on the truth.
As everyone with a conscience knows by now, Pretti was shot ten times after being wrestled to the ground by multiple U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers.
Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin issued a statement shortly after claiming Pretti approached officers with a "9 mm semi-automatic handgun.” After he “violently resisted” attempts to disarm him, “an agent fired defensive shots.” She added “this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement."
There was enough video evidence to completely contradict that false narrative. But that didn’t stop White House senior adviser Stephen Miller from later posting this on X: “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.”
Two hours later, Noem repeated the lies.
Why not, they all must have thought. A few weeks earlier they claimed Renee Good was a domestic terrorist who tried to run over the ICE agent who shot and killed her. Trump, who said he watched a video of the incident, actually said she “violently, willfully, and viciously” ran him over.
Most congressional Republicans and the entire right-wing media weren’t troubled by those lies.
It’s also the same playbook DHS used in a shooting by a CBP officer that occurred in Chicago in early October.
Marimar Martinez was accused of being a domestic terrorist after she allegedly rammed her car into a CBP vehicle and then drove directly at the officer. He fired five shots, one of which hit her in the arm.
This month, the felony charges they brought against her fell apart. The allegation the officer’s car had been boxed in by ten vehicles before the shooting was proven false by video evidence obtained from the surveillance camera of a nearby business. And government lawyers couldn’t refute the defense’s contention that it was the agent who ran into Martinez’s car because DHS let the officer drive his car back to his home in Maine before the investigators inspected it.
It's also worth noting that the repeated claim DHS made about Martinez being “armed with a semiautomatic weapon” wasn’t included in the indictment against her.
Every one of the above lies were built on the foundation of a bigger one.
Throughout the last presidential campaign, Trump howled about how millions of immigrants and asylum-seeking refugees entering the U.S. had been recently released from “prisons and jails.” Those “killers” and “gang members” were “poisoning our country.”
His mass deportation program that was supposed to focus on the “worst of the worst” turned to arresting mostly law-abiding illegal immigrants. Hundreds of American citizens have also been apprehended.
The springboard for those lies was the one Trump hasn’t stopped telling since he lost the 2020 election.
“This has to stop,” Gabriel Sterling cried out on the steps of Georgia’s Capitol in December of that year. The Republican election official was referring to the election fraud conspiracies Trump was promoting. “Someone's going to get hurt, someone's going to get shot, someone's going to get killed," he warned.
A month later, Trump supporters violently attacked the U.S. Capitol.
During the subsequent impeachment trial, Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Trump was “practically and morally responsible for provoking” the insurrection. “The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things.”
Trump “didn't get away with anything yet – yet,” McConnell added before he and 42 other Republicans, including Sen. Dan Sullivan, voted to acquit Trump. Four years later, they helped reward him with a second term in the White House.
No wonder the people in his administration believe the truth doesn’t matter.
Chasing Noem out of Washington would be a good start to changing that culture. But the country will remain mired in muck of Trump’s destructive lies if congressional Republicans continue to let him get away with it.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.
