In the age of rampant AI slop, seeing isn’t always believing. There’s more than one way, though, to make people doubt their own eyes.
Many have long predicted and warned that AI deepfakes could profoundly distort public opinion. For example, although swiftly debunked, a fake video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urging his troops to surrender in early 2022 seemed to be a harbinger of horrors to come—when AI would become indistinguishable from reality.
But as events this week in Minneapolis and the White House demonstrate, no visual manipulation is necessary for forging reality from whole cloth. All it takes is a federal government united around its leader’s preferred narrative.
On Tuesday afternoon, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fatally shot a woman driving an SUV in a Minneapolis suburb. Amid a crowd protesting the agency’s recent incursion into the Twin Cities, legal observer Renee Nicole Good was stopped in the middle of the street when federal vehicles zoomed toward her, sirens wailing.
Agents then hopped out of the vehicles and aggressively approached Good’s car on foot. As captured on video from multiple angles, she tried to evade the agents, prompting one of them to fire several shots through Good’s windshield, one of which hit her face. She died of her injuries on the scene.
Even before many of the above details were known or confirmed, the official government narrative had already begun to coalesce.
Today, ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.…
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) January 7, 2026
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Who are you going to believe?
Journalism may be the first rough draft of history, but the Trump administration, famously hostile toward journalists, prefers to write the first rough draft of reality themselves, in real time—occasionally with a Sharpie pen.
As videos of the incident in Minneapolis proliferated online, a tweet from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) declared that a nameless “violent rioter” had committed “an act of domestic terrorism” by “attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them.”
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem soon held a press conference, reiterating this version of events. She claimed that the still-nameless woman had been “stalking” officers and suggested that she’d used her vehicle as a weapon. Both accounts claimed that officers involved had been “hurt” but “expected to make a full recovery.”
Of course, no narrative from the Trump administration is complete until the president himself weighs in, which he did soon enough on Truth Social. Apparently, it wasn’t enough for Trump to just reiterate the skewed DHS version of events; instead, he added some flourishes of his own.
In Trump’s telling, the driver hadn’t merely attempted to run over an ICE agent; she’d “viciously ran over” him—to the point where “it is hard to believe he is still alive.”
Before Good’s name had even been confirmed by The Minnesota Star Tribune and released to the public, the administration had turned her into an attempted murderer (the rare type of attempted murderer, no less, who drives around with a glove box full of stuffed animals for her young child).
Stranger than fiction
Much remains unknown about the events that led to Good’s killing, since video has yet to emerge showing what happened before her vehicle stopped in the middle of the road.
Whether her attempt to flee the scene was illegal or ill-advised may be up for debate. What is absolutely certain, though, is that this was the ninth ICE shooting since just last September, which suggests that Good had more reason to be scared of the agents than they were of her.
Either way, to describe what is depicted in the videos as a ramming attack is so staggeringly detached from reality, it’s an attack on the very idea that one should believe their own eyes.
Unfortunately, in this administration, such brazen fabrications are par for the course.
One day before Good’s shooting death, the White House crystallized Trump’s paradoxical reframing of the Capitol riots with an official new government web page. On the fifth anniversary of the attack, the administration touted a timeline that grossly misrepresented what happened on January 6, 2021, despite countless freely available video clips taken by the rioters themselves.
In this fanciful retelling, the pro-Trump marchers were “orderly and spirited,” while the Capitol police escalated tensions by firing tear gas and flash-bangs for no reason. And somehow it’s all then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s fault.
Perhaps more egregious, the site presents this revisionist history as a corrective to the purportedly revisionist history spun by the Biden administration. It’s not that Trump and his defenders are being dishonest; they’re just the only ones courageous enough to tell the truth!
“The Democrats masterfully reversed reality after January 6,” the site reads, “branding peaceful patriotic protesters as ‘insurrectionists’ and framing the event as a violent coup attempt orchestrated by Trump—despite no evidence of armed rebellion or intent to overthrow the government.”
In truth, roughly 174 of the 608 defendants charged with assaulting, resisting, or interfering with law enforcement that day were charged for using a deadly or dangerous weapon or otherwise causing serious injury to an officer.
Footage that shows it happening is out there for all to see. But for the second Trump administration, it doesn’t matter if hard video evidence disproves their narrative. What matters is their unwavering insistence that their narrative is the way it is.
Seeing is still believing
Although Trump’s reelection in 2024 has essentially rendered moot the truth about January 6, the story of what happened in Minneapolis on Wednesday is still developing. Local politicians are not mincing words as they attempt to wrest control of the narrative out of Trump’s hands—and back into the realm of evidential reality.
“They are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said during a press conference on Wednesday. “Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly: that is bullshit.”
Shortly afterward, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz tweeted that he’d also seen the video and urged people to not “believe this propaganda machine.” (Walz was on the business end of Trump’s “propaganda machine” last Saturday, when the president reposted a video falsely suggesting that Walz was behind the murder of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman last summer—a video Hortman’s children have asked Trump to take down, so far to no avail.)
Walz’s and Frey’s statements reiterate that seeing is believing, an idea that Trump himself apparently shares.
Asked by visiting New York Times reporters on Wednesday about his version of events—in which Renee Nicole Good viciously ran over an ICE agent—the president ordered an assistant to play video footage that he seemed to think proved him correct.
While watching the video, the reporters claim they told Trump that the angle did not appear to show an ICE officer had been run over.
“Well,” Trump responds, “I—the way I look at it . . .” He then apparently trails off, without ever admitting that the footage shows something different than what he previously claimed it does.
The report describes this remarkable exchange as “a glimpse into Mr. Trump’s reflexive defense of what has become a sometimes violent federal crackdown on immigration.”
But this characterization doesn’t tell the full story. It’s more of a glimpse into how the president routinely invents whatever version of reality best serves him, regardless of whether it clashes with reality’s version of reality.
On Thursday morning, the Times released a forensic analysis of Good’s killing from three different angles, which definitively contradicts Trump’s account.
And yet even conclusive video evidence is bound to have little impact—as long as the president’s supporters in and out of Congress insist on only viewing the world the way Trump looks at it.
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