How the post-truth politics of Donald Trump and Elon Musk engineered the brutal, unpopular ICE occupation -- and what the resistance is actually about.
Brian Merchant
Jan 16, 2026
Jonathan Ross’s point-blank shooting of Renee Nicole Good in the head feels exceptional not for its cruelty or even its novelty—this is the United States after all, where a mass shooting or a police killing is always just around the bend—but ultimately, its immateriality to the state. Immediately after Good was murdered, the State Department declared her a “domestic terrorist.” President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that he’d watched video of the incident—the same video we have all now seen, in which Good attempts to drive her car around and away from Ross, who fires three shots into her head then casually walks over to the crashed car—and decided that Good “viciously ran over the ICE Officer.” Trump adds that “based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.”
The surreality of this claim has been much remarked upon already. What’s notable isn’t the lie, since Trump lies copiously and unashamedly (it’s one of his core features, his chief political innovations, even) but the marked disinterest in even appealing to any conception of truth, and the ease with which such a horrific event was slotted into the state’s storyline. How no effort was taken to even bother to square events on the ground. Trump might well have not watched the video at all before he wrote his defense of the ICE agent (pure online poster behavior) his description of its contents was so obviously off base. Trump’s team knows that with enough workable content and the benefit of an official statement, his supporters will advance his preferred narrative; cheerleading, posting support and unwittingly out of context commentary. It might never have occurred to Orwell that authoritarians might successfully beseech their citizens to discount obvious truths simply because they were too lazy to watch a two-minute video clip.
But that’s the point. It didn’t matter. The state is treating this as an online argument that can be won by posting red meat, since Twitter, or rather X, the everything app, is real life now, and the administration no longer feels compelled to even gesture towards the truth. The Trump administration simply declaring what it would like to have transpired, even in the face of ample and obvious documentation to the contrary, works.
When more details surfaced, like a video revealing that Ross called Good “a fucking bitch” immediately after shooting her in the face, Trump simply adjusted his story on the fly, saying Good’s crime was being “disrespectful.” It could not matter less whether she was assaulting an officer with her car or just being rude; her death can be explained away, even made useful. The Department of Justice was instructed to open an investigation into her purported terrorist activities that is such an obvious sham that six prosecutors have quit rather than participate.
This is why, to me, these last weeks have been particularly unmooring, even after the endless chemical train wreck of 2025. The media and technology critic Neil Postman famously argued that the incipient American dystopia wasn’t the blunt overpowering fascism of 1984, but rather Huxley’s intoxicatingly mediated brave new world—we were all on the brink of amusing ourselves to death. It turns out they’ve both arrived, in tandem; the state is booming obvious falsehoods in our face and demanding we accept them, and they are simultaneously being packaged into infotainment to delight the converted and enrage the opposed. It’s a feelie that tells us 2+2=5.
Abolish the senses - by Brian Merchant |
