In the final seconds before she is shot to death, in the last words she will ever utter, 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good smiles lightly at a federal ICE agent who has been checking out her SUV and declares, “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.”
To which the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, will tell all of America, whose residents he must perceive to be blind and deaf, “She behaved horribly. And then she ran him over. She didn’t try to run him over. She ran him over.”
This is a calculated lie, naked enough for millions of fair-minded people to acknowledge.
And cruel enough to enrage all who hear such bilge.
Good, the mother of three, who had just dropped one of her children at school, “violently, willfully and viciously ran over” the ICE agent, Trump further lied.
Oh, how nice. This president now expresses his deep concern for a police officer.
Don’t forget, this is the same president who unleashed the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill rioters who tortured and bloodied and killed 174 police officers.
And then pardoned all the rioters.
How nice that he finds concern for this officer who killed Renee Good.
As several video angles show us, ICE agents surround Good’s SUV as it blocks part of a neighborhood street. One agent attempts to open the driver’s door. Good, who had been moving backwards, now reverses and moves forward, simultaneously turning the car to the right, away from an agent standing near her. If he looks at her, the agent can easily see her turning the steering wheel away from him.
This is still just an instant after Good’s smiling remark, “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.”
And an instant before she will be shot to death.
Meanwhile Good’s wife, Becca Good, is shown on video telling another ICE officer, who’s photographing the SUV’s license plate, “That’s OK, we don’t change our plates every morning, just so you know. It’ll be the same plate when you come talking to us later.”
Her tone is jaunty, unthreatening, and her body language relaxed.
All of this, Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, will describe as “an act of domestic terrorism.”
This is another lie, launched in anticipation that it’s delivered to a nation of the blind and the deaf.
Now, as an ICE agent walks to the front of the SUV, Becca Good says, “That’s fine. U.S. citizen. Former f—–’ veteran.”
And once more in a jaunty tone, she looks directly at an agent videotaping all of this and adds, “You want to come at us? I say go get yourself some lunch, big boy. Go ahead.”
In that instant, an ICE agent declares, “Get out of the car. Get out of the f—–’ car.”
To which Vice President JD Vance announces, with a straight face, “You can accept that this woman’s death is a tragedy while acknowledging it’s a tragedy of her own making.”
No, you can’t. Not if you’ve watched the video, and heard the Goods’ words, and the tone of their voices.
The ICE agent, Vance tells us, “fired in self-defense after she made frontal contact. Do you think this officer is wrong in defending his life against a deranged leftist who tried to run him over?”
“Frontal contact?”
You can’t prove it by the videos.
“Deranged leftist?”
Another lie.
And it’s the larger point of this tragedy.
The lying is naked enough, and cruel enough, that it becomes the major point of the Trump administration: We can do what we want, legal or otherwise, and you can’t stop us.
We can do what we want, and we will not only lie about it – we will make up fresh lies about those we have victimized.
Trump and his lackeys can’t even let the dead rest in peace.
And they want us to see it.
Renee Good is described by those who actually knew her as “extremely compassionate … loving, forgiving and affectionate … one of the kindest people.”
The White House crowd, knowing nothing about her nor caring, calls her “a deranged leftist…violent, vicious.”
Does this enrage millions who believe in the America that’s being taken away from us? Yes, of course. But the president of the United States doesn’t care, nor do his lackeys.
They want us to see that the truth no longer matters. They want us to feel hopeless and frightened. They want us to see the cruelty and heartlessness at the core of this administration.
The Minneapolis killing happens in the same week Trump officials try to freeze $10 billion in Social Services funds from five Democratic-led states — and a federal judge finally stands in their way.
It’s the same week Trump freezes food assistance funding in Minnesota.
It’s the same week he threatens to take Greenland “the hard way.”
It’s the same week Trump sits in the Oval Office and tells five New York Times reporters the only thing that can check his power is his own sense of “morality.”
Good luck with that one.
As for the ICE agent who killed Renee Good, the best thing to say is that he panicked and overreacted. But he’s a small part of the problem. From the beginning of Trump’s order to put such agents on America’s streets, there were warnings issued: there will be blood.
The killing of Renee Good was inevitable. But so is the White House response of orchestrated lies, as nakedly outrageous and nauseating as they are.
So get used to it, everybody. Because Minneapolis is just the beginning.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).
Last weekend's Flower Mart once again demonstrated that there's nothing to fear about downtown Baltimore, writes Michael Olesker.
A junior at Roland Park Country School, Katie Grossman writes about a recent experience that spurred her to take action to fight antisemitism.
At a time when many Jews fear appearing Jewish in public, seeing Judaism depicted correctly onscreen is reassuring, writes Jewish content creator Rabbi Yael Buechler.
Cruel, inappropriate, egomanical, outrageous and bullying are all attributes that pass for presidential these days, writes Michael Olesker.