THURSDAY, JANUARY 8, 2026
...the president followed suit: Yesterday morning, all too clearly, it started with Kristi Noem.
The story-shaping has continued from there, including a ludicrous performance on yesterday's edition of The Five. In fairness, the story-shaping—the sifting of elementary facts—extended into the opening segment of today's Morning Joe.
In the aftermath of yesterday's fatal shooting, it was Rashomon on steroids--Rashomon all the way down!
Indeed, the Rashomon was general over what's left of the American discourse. Just to make that reference clear, the leading authority on Rashomon clumsily says that the famous film famously teaches this:
Rashomon
Rashomon is a 1950 Japanese film directed by Akira Kurosawa... It follows various people who describe how a samurai was murdered in a forest. Every element is largely identical, from the murdered samurai speaking through a Shinto psychic to the bandit in the forest, the monk, the assault of the wife, and the dishonest retelling of the events in which everyone shows their ideal self by [offering a different version of the events in question].
That's a clumsily stated overview, but it might start to convey the film's well-known basic idea. We've replaced the word "lying" at the end of that thumbnail account.
Rashomon is often said to preach the view that there is so obvious way to agree on a single, simple account of a set of events. Yesterday, the problem started with the latest ludicrous performance by Noem, but it certainly didn't end there.
It extended into Morning Joe, but also into weirdly sanitized reporting in today's New York Times. All in all, we'd say that this varied set of performances says that we the humans simply weren't built for this line of work.
The anthropology here is quite clear. But let's start at the beginning:
Yesterday morning, Noem staged her latest fashion show down in Brownsville, Texas. We'll assume that someone had misinformed her, but she rushed out to offer this absurd account of the Minneapolis shooting:
NOEM (1/7/25): It was an act of domestic terrorism. What happened was our ICE officers were out in enforcement action. They got stuck in the snow because of the adverse weather that is in Minneapolis.
They were attempting to push out their vehicle and a woman attacked them and those surrounding them and attempted to run them over and rammed them with her vehicle. An officer of ours acted quickly and defensively shot to protect himself and the people around him. And my understanding is that she was hit and is deceased.
So said the routinely ludicrous Noem, from beneath her giant hat.
We'll assume that Noem herself had been misinformed by someone. That said, no one had been "stuck in the snow" in connection with the fatal shooting, and the ICE officers in question hadn't been "attempting to push out their vehicle" at any point in the course of what occurred.
Noem looked fetching in her hat, but those statements were absurdly inaccurate. Debate could imaginably surround her additional claims--her claims that the late Renee Good had "attempted to run [the ICE officers] over" and had "rammed them with her vehicle."
In our view, those claims are extremely far-fetched, but we could imagine a different assessment. The other claims which emerged from Noem—the claims about being stuck in the snow—were baldly, absurdly inaccurate.
That said, Noem is no stranger to inaccurate claims, even to claims which seem to be utterly crazy. You may recall the lunatic story she told Jesse Watters in late June of last year—and yes, she actually told this crazy story about one ICE detainee:
NOEM (6/27/25): Listen, Jesse, you calling these guys "bad hombres"—they really are. I was talking to a U.S. Marshall just yesterday, and he was talking about the fact that they were deporting a planeload of illegals and one of them was a cannibal.
And he kind of said it off-handed, and I said to him, 'What do you—what do you mean, it was a cannibal?" And he said, "Well we put him on the plane, put him in his seat, and he started to eat his own arms, he was such a deranged individual."
This is the kind of people that President Trump is getting off of our streets—people who are murderers and rapists and, and are deranged individuals, that we are working to get out of the country as fast as possible.
Noem went on, at some length, about the story she said she'd been told. To show the challenges faced by ICE, she told Watters this:
ICE had been deporting a planeload of detainees. In an attempt to free himself from the handcuffs which restrained him, one of them, a cannibal, had attempted to eat his own arm!
Incredibly, Noem actually said that—and she seemed to think it made sense. Three days later, at Florida's new Alligator Alcatraz, she told this same crazy story, in substantial detail, once again!
(For our real-time report about this crazy pair of recitations, you can just click here.)
What could be going through the mind of someone who tells, then repeats, such a ridiculous story? What could be going through the mind of someone who seems to believe such a ridiculous tale?
We don't have the slightest idea. But yesterday morning, vamping in Texas, there Noem went again.
In fairness, we'll assume that someone had misinformed Noem about yesterday's fatal shooting. But having failed to fact-check what she'd been told, she rushed out to start a chain of inaccurate and/or selective presentations about that shooting.
As part of that, she even made the dramatic claim that Renee Good had been involved in "an act of domestic terrorism." She didn't know what the weather had been. But true to the demands of storyline, Noem was prepared to rush right out and offer the world that story.
Yesterday morning, Noem went first. Plainly, she didn't have the slightest idea concerning what had actually happened, but she rushed out and spoke anyway.
Soon, it was the president's turn.
The president's account was offered in a Truth Social post. Pathetically but inevitably, the most powerful person in the world was now saying this:
Truth Details
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
I have just viewed the clip of the event which took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is a horrible thing to watch. The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital. The situation is being studied, in its entirety, but the reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis. They are just trying to do the job of MAKING AMERICA SAFE. We need to stand by and protect our Law Enforcement Officers from this Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate!
PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP
Yes, that's actually what he said. Now for some clarification:
In the videotape of the fatal shooting, a woman is heard screaming at the ICE officers—first as they attempt to force Renee Good out of her car, then after one of them has fatally shot her. In his account of what he saw, the president starts with a ludicrous assumption about that woman, then proceeds to the crazily inaccurate claim that Good "viciously ran over the ICE Officer."
A person might say this:
Only a badly disordered person could fail to imagine an innocent reason for that woman's (horrified) screaming. Beyond that, and obviously:
Good did not "run over" any ICE officer in the course of yesterday's events. In fact, no one got "run over" by anyone's car in the course of this fatal shooting.
That said, crazily inaccurate, poisonous claims are nothing new to this president. As we noted last week, he has also made these claims:
In July 2019, on the very day that Jeffrey Epstein died, he took to Twitter to say or suggest that Bill and Hillary Clinton had somehow been involved in Epstein's death. There was absolutely zero basis for that poisonous presentation, but the sitting president rushed out to make it all the same.
Also this:
This past summer, the sitting president returned to a somewhat similar claim—to the poisonous claim that Bill Clinton had made more than two dozen trips to Jeffrey Epstein's island! There's zero basis for that poisonous claim, but the president returned to it anyway, even after it had been repeatedly refuted by major fact check organizations.
Yesterday's fatal shooting vastly complicated the story we were trying to tell this week. For today, we'll merely offer this:
When Kristi Noem told her ludicrous story about the fellow who tried to eat his own arm—when she told that story two separate times—major orgs in Blue America agreed to let the craziness go. So too with the poisonous and crazy claims the poisonous president has been making for the past fifteen years.
Something is badly wrong with this president. That basic fact has always been right there for all to see.
That basic fact has never been hidden or disguised. That said, no one has dared to say the obvious:
t's time for this nutcase, or perhaps for this liar, to go.
Timorous journalists have all looked away! Tomorrow, we'll continue from here.
Tomorrow: Is it a matter of "mental illness?" Or is it a question of "character?"
