Donald Trump dodged and ducked questions about footage that appears to contradict his version of events surrounding the killing of a Minnesota woman by a federal ICE agent.
New York Times reporters confronted the president in a group interview in the Oval Office on Wednesday after the death of Rene Nicole Good, a 37-year-old American from Minneapolis. “It’s a terrible scene,” Trump eventually conceded, having otherwise stuck to his original narrative. “I think it’s horrible to watch. No, I hate to see it.”
Video circulating on social media on Wednesday morning showed an ICE agent yelling at Good on a Minneapolis street, telling her to get out of the “f–king car” as he approached her SUV. As Good appears to pull away in the clip, another agent toward the front of the car removes his gun and unloads three shots through the windshield as he backs away.
The fatal shooting has shocked the nation, as has Trump’s initial response. “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,” he wrote on Truth Social not long after the news broke.
“Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital,” he went on. “We need to stand by and protect our Law Enforcement Officers from this Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate!”
Times reporters pressed the president on that version of events at their Oval Office meeting later that day. “That was a vicious situation that took place,” he initially said, in what was taken as a reference to his prior claim, unsupported by the content of the footage, that Good had “run over” the ICE agent.
The 79-year-old leader only doubled down to insist “she behaved horribly” as reporters continued to point out inconsistencies in his narrative, telling them, “I’ll play the tape for you right now.”
As aide Natalie Harp a laptop over to the Resolute Desk, Trump told the journalists, “With all of it being said, no, I don’t like that happening” before going off on a diatribe about illegal immigration. As the clip—which does not show that Good had “run over” the agent—played for the president he eventually said it was “horrible to watch” but did not retract his prior statements.
The scene was reported by Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a Times White House correspondent, who said the exchange offered “a glimpse into Mr. Trump’s reflexive defense of what has become a sometimes violent federal crackdown on immigration.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.
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