Don’t be fooled. When it comes to Donald Trump, what might look like a full retreat is almost always a mere tactical withdrawal, designed to buy time. He’ll step back when he’s forced to, under pressure, but will then revert the instant the pressure lets up. Too often, his opponents, whether at home or abroad, allow themselves to be played, confusing a mere pause for a surrender – and the risk is strong that they’re making that same mistake all over again.
This week, the US president won praise in some quarters for moving to “de-escalate” the war he has been waging on the people of Minneapolis. Following the killing of Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse who posed no threat and yet was shot at least 10 times by masked agents of Customs and Border Protection or CBP, Trump signalled that he wanted to calm things down.
He shipped out the man who had become the face of the campaign of terror conducted by both CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, Gregory Bovino, a buzzcut cliche of a villain whose chief mission appeared to be the generation of “content”, specifically images of himself strutting around Democrat-led cities like the general of an occupying army, right down to the SS-style greatcoat.
Next, Trump subjected his homeland security secretary, the puppy-killing Kristi Noem, to an emergency Oval Office meeting, from which his chief domestic policy adviser and the architect of the anti-immigrant purge, Stephen Miller, was pointedly excluded. To complete the picture, Trump spoke to Democratic leaders in Minnesota, later saying that he and they were now on “a similar wavelength”.
That he felt compelled to make these moves is testament to the depth of revulsion prompted by Pretti’s killing. Video footage, as well as the dead man’s biography, made a mockery of the administration’s initial claims that Pretti was a “would-be assassin” bent on staging a “massacre”. In Pretti, as with Renee Nicole Good, the armed agents of the state had picked the wrong victim, someone Team Trump could not plausibly cast as “a domestic terrorist”, though that didn’t stop them trying.
The citizens of Minneapolis have also defied the script Miller and Trump wrote for them. They have refused to play the role of crazed urban mob, triggering the riot that would have handed Miller, in particular, the pretext he seems to crave to invoke the Insurrection Act, thereby allowing the White House to use the full force of the US military to crush domestic opposition. Instead, Minneapolitans have acted nonviolently, monitoring ICE rather than confronting it, armed with nothing more menacing than whistles.
These facts have reached the US public, despite the White House’s efforts to shape an alternative, wholly false, reality. Credit for that goes to the reporters, and camera-wielding citizens, who have ensured that Americans, and the rest of the world, can see what ICE and CBP are doing. Plenty will have a specific image or detail they can point to as the one that proved too much to bear. For some, including voters who may well have once approved of Trump’s plans to crack down on illegal migration, it will have been the sight of a terrified five-year-old boy, wearing a Spider-Man backpack, taken into custody by armed agents.
For my own part, it was learning that, because thousands of people in Minneapolis have not left their homes for days for fear of being picked up, or worse, by the masked men of ICE, volunteers have taken to discreetly delivering bags of groceries to their door. That leapt out because, as I discovered in the research for my book The Traitors Circle, a handful of dissident Germans used to perform the same act of kindness for the hidden Jews of Berlin under the Third Reich.
Outrage that such deeds are necessary in the US of 2026 would not, on its own, have done enough to shift Trump. What proved more decisive was the misstep by several of his underlings, who argued that Pretti had made himself a legitimate target by carrying a firearm. That instantly incensed the gun lobby, which is usually reflexively pro-Trump, but which has also long insisted on the right to bear arms, including at demonstrations.
The nature of the Trumpians, as spelled out this month by the former White House strategist Steve Bannon, is to drive ever deeper until they meet resistance. When that resistance is the rock of the Maga base, and that rock cracks, they stop drilling.
But, remember, it’s only ever a pause. The instant the pressure eases, normal service resumes. Having talked of de-escalation on Tuesday, Trump was back threatening Minneapolis’s Democratic mayor on Wednesday, warning him that he was “playing with fire” by standing in ICE’s way. On Thursday, Trump was asked if he was pulling back in Minnesota. “No, no. Not at all,” he replied. Later that night, federal agents arrested ex-CNN anchor Don Lemon on charges relating to his presence at a protest at a Minnesota church earlier this month. Meanwhile, for all the earlier talk, both Noem and Miller remain in their jobs.
In other words, there is no pivot. ICE is continuing to buy up warehouse-style “mega” detention facilities for the tens of thousands caught in its dragnet. And all the usual Trumpian excesses continue. Late in the week, the president filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, seeking $10bn compensation for the leak of his past tax returns. Considering that he oversees the IRS, the decision on whether to settle the case by paying Donald Trump billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money will ultimately be made by … Donald Trump. I would say his chances are pretty good.
The pattern is clear. Trump will do just enough to get through a damaging news cycle, wait for it to pass – then carry on as before. We saw the first half of that manoeuvre last week, which began with threats to seize Greenland and ended with those threats seemingly withdrawn under international and domestic fire. Nato and European leaders probably thought they’d seen off the danger. But this week Trump’s Greenland envoy was back demanding “total, unfettered access” to the island, so who knows what his boss might say next week.
This is why I worry about the deal struck late on Thursday by Senate Democrats, which saw the latter agree to keep funding the US government, thereby avoiding another shutdown, rather than withholding the cash until Trump meets their demands to “rein in” ICE. Now there will be two weeks of talks. The fear is that Democrats have let slip their moment of maximum leverage, when public outrage at ICE and CBP was at its peak, and will instead see the current anger fade. They will have walked right into Trump’s trap, as spelled out by the administration official who admitted that this week’s “de-escalatory measures” were designed to placate Senate Democrats just enough that they failed to seize the moment.
The lesson for those battling Trump, whether Democrats or nervous allies overseas, is not to celebrate an apparent climbdown too early. Instead, you resist until he retreats and, when he does, you don’t relax – you push even harder.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
