At the White House on Friday, Donald Trump endorsed his vice-president’s baseless claim that Renee Good, the 37-year-old woman killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on Wednesday, was part of a shadowy “leftwing network” trying “to incite violence” against federal agents.
Asked by a Fox News correspondent to expand on JD Vance’s comments about Good, the president said that the vice-president “is generally very accurate” and then cited what he referred to as evidence that at least one person in Good’s vicinity when she was killed was “probably a paid agitator”.
The claim that none of the protesters who oppose his mass deportation campaign are motivated by horror at what is being done to their neighbors, but must be paid operatives, is a familiar one for Trump, who has made it repeatedly in recent months.
In Good’s case, Trump focused on the fact that, in video of federal agents killing her that was recorded by a witness, someone could be heard screaming the word “shame” repeatedly, which indicated to him that that person must have been “a professional troublemaker”.
“I watched that,” Trump said. “There was a woman screaming: ‘Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!’ She was a[n] agitator, probably a paid agitator, but in my opinion she was an agitator, a very high-level agitator, so professional. She wouldn’t stop screaming.”
It was unclear whether the person who screamed “shame” at the ICE officers at least 10 times during the incident was the person who recorded the video, or someone standing near her. But the president’s assertion that only a paid agitator would scream at ICE agents carrying out immigration raids on the streets of American cities is contradicted by hundreds of recorded incidents over the past year.
The video did capture a witness to the killing of Good screaming “shame” at the agents at two different points. First, the person screamed the word twice as the agents attempted to pull Good from her vehicle and then opened fire.
A short time later, as the person recording the incident approached the agent who killed Good, their voice, or that of someone behind them, could be heard shouting the admonition at him eight more times as he walked away from the scene.
The president also complained that the person’s horrified screams had made it difficult for him to watch the video of the killing on television.
“The news sort of turned her down, turned her off because you’re trying to watch - she was so loud and so crazy and just not normal,” he said.
“When somebody sees something like that,” he said, referring to the point-blank shooting of a neighbor, “they don’t go screaming and screaming, and the same words. So, I guess you could say, professional, but I didn’t think she did a very good job.”
“You have agitators,” the president concluded, “and we will always be protecting ICE, and we’re always going to be protecting our border patrol and our law enforcement.”
