When enough is enough for the US media: The murder of a poet and a veteran’s nurse
Opinion
Could the murder of a veteran’s nurse be the turning point for the US media in the presidency of Donald Trump?
Investors fantasise about using the most sophisticated analysis to determine when the markets are about to turn, for better or worse, so they can make pots of money by buying or selling – whichever is appropriate.
Usually, it is little more than a fantasy, and true professionals concede that even if they do manage to get such a call right, it’s only by chance.
The journalistic equivalent is trying to work out when the US people, and in particular the Republican majority in Congress, will finally have had enough of the increasingly unhinged President Donald J. Trump.
So far, journalists who have tried such predictions have failed spectacularly and are left to muse forlornly that Trump really can, as he has previously claimed, get away with almost everything, and no one seems to care enough.
This is no prediction, and it seems foolhardy to even ask the question. But here is the question nonetheless.
Have we reached a turning point?
Has the turning point been reached on Trump, if not with his most diehard MAGA supporters, then with significant sections of the American media, which has, until now, persisted in trying to normalise what is anything but normal.
There were widespread protests after the murder of Renee Good in Minnesota earlier this month, but somehow even this wasn’t quite enough. She was denounced as “a poet “and a lesbian, as if that somehow justified her fate. And as there was a car involved, even though she was driving away from the ICE agent who killed her, the Trump administration was able to lie that she had used her car as a weapon.
Maybe one brutal death, however horrible, on its own is not enough and in terms of media and political momentum, more is needed.
Events are now speeding up, and Trump has had to back down three times in a week. First, it was over Greenland, followed by his slurs on the extent of NATO’s role in Afghanistan.
Then, perhaps the climbdown following the most important issue for the American media and public – the gratuitous murder of a veteran’s nurse, Alex Pritti, complete with attendant lies from the top of the Trump administration.
Could Pritti and the reactions to his death be one monstrosity too far, even for Trump?
This time, the media has left no room for doubt over how Pritti was murdered.
Media organisations, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Associated Press, ABC News, and CBS Television, have analysed the numerous recordings of the Pritti shooting, frame by frame. Their conclusions are unambiguous.
Pritti had been surrounded by ICE agents, the holstered gun he had been wearing had been removed, and he was sheltering a woman who was being pepper-sprayed with his body when he was shot 10 times in five seconds.
Trump officials tried to argue that he had come with a gun to kill federal agents despite, as the National Rifle Association pointed out, his was a legally held gun, and he had the right to have it under the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller described Pritti as “an assassin”, while Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem claimed that Pritti had been brandishing a gun and had attacked ICE officers.
The work of the media, helped by all those in the crowds who recorded the scene, showed that none of such claims were true and that Alex Pritti was murdered in cold blood when he posed no threat to anyone.
A political liability?
The Wall Street Journal argued that Stephan Miller’s deportation methods were turning immigration, an issue Mr Trump owned in 2024, into a political liability – an opinion backed up by the latest opinion polls. Overall, 57% of Americans somewhat or strongly disapprove of how ICE is handling its job.
“Americans don’t want law enforcement shooting people in the street or arresting five-year-old boys. The Trump administration spin on this simply isn’t believable,” the WSJ wrote.
The New York Times reported that its frame-by-frame analysis of actions by Pritti and the two officers who fired at him 10 times “shows how lethal force came to be used against a target who didn’t pose a threat.”
People, the media has been saying, should believe the evidence of their own eyes rather than demonstrably false statements from the Trump administration.
Former Democratic Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton urged Americans to “speak out” and take action after the Minneapolis shooting.
Tellingly, President Clinton wrote that “over the course of a lifetime, we face only a few moments where the decisions we make and the actions we take will shape our history for years to come.”
Clinton added: “This is one of them. If we give our freedoms away after 250 years, we might never get them back.”
As Trump tries to tone down the pro-ICE rhetoric, he has clearly lost a lot of the support of the American people and media, and it takes some going for the beleaguered President to even upset the National Rifle Association.
Nurses and poets
Trump has also clearly lost the support of Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail, a columnist who was willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt at the start of his second administration.
Neil told the story this week about how, at the height of widespread protests in Paris in May 1968, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was jailed.
He was immediately released by President de Gaulle, who said, ” You don’t arrest Voltaire.”
“In Trump’s America, they don’t (yet) jail philosophers either. But they do kill nurses and poets. To its everlasting shame,” Neil argued.
But has the turning point for Trump finally been reached?
The political tragedy has probably got a few more twists and turns to take, but we are heading towards the final sections of the last act, and it is unlikely to end well for Donald J. Trump.
This is particularly so because, at long last, the American media is trusting itself to report what it can see with its own eyes rather than repeating the official lies that daily spew from the White House and the rest of the Trump administration.
Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays — bookmark his column here.