Twice since the start of the year, federal officers have gunned down protesters in Minneapolis with cellphone cameras rolling and twice President Trump and his lieutenants have rushed forward with a message to the American people: Don’t believe what you see with your own eyes.
Without waiting for facts, the Trump team has advanced one-sided narratives to justify each of the killings and demonize the victims. Renee Good, a mother of three, was engaged in “domestic terrorism” and “viciously ran over the ICE Officer,” they declared. Alex Pretti, an I.C.U. nurse at a veterans’ hospital, was an “assassin” aiming to “massacre law enforcement.”
The trick is that the Trump versions of reality have collided with bystander videos watched by millions who did not see what they were told. Ms. Good did not run over the ICE agent who killed her; a video analysis suggested she was trying to turn away from him and he continued to shoot her even as she passed him. Mr. Pretti approached officers with a phone in his hand, not a gun; he moved to help a woman who was pepper sprayed and he was under a pileup of agents when one suddenly shot him in the back.
The videos, sometimes shaky, incomplete or at a distance, may not show the totality of what happened in those split seconds on the street and they do not speak to what was going through the heads of the officers who opened fire in what is being called self-defense. Many questions about exactly what happened remain unanswered and further investigation could change the common understanding of the deadly events in Minneapolis, perhaps even bolstering the Trump administration’s assertions, although the administration is blocking independent inquiries.
But Mr. Trump has found that putting out a story line early and repeating it often can, with the help of an ideological media and online surround-sound machine, convince a sizable share of the public that does not credit contrary evidence. Even after investigations, recounts and his own advisers and attorney general refuted Mr. Trump’s claim that he won the 2020 election, polls show that most Republicans still believe the election was stolen.
And so Mr. Trump and his team have taken the same reality-bending approach to the violence in Minneapolis in evident hopes of persuading the president’s political base, at least, that the protesters who have been shot are responsible for their own deaths and that “the victims are the Border Patrol agents,” as Gregory Bovino, the official in charge of Mr. Trump’s Border Patrol operations, put it on CNN on Sunday.
And indeed, many of Mr. Trump’s supporters watch the same videos of the deadly incidents in Minneapolis and find in the sometimes murky images details that to them justify the shootings, actions by Ms. Good or Mr. Pretti that appear more threatening than what many others see. In effect, the videos have become a national Rorschach test for American polarization.
The families of Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti have expressed outrage over the distortions presented by the Trump administration. “The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting,” Mr. Pretti’s parents said in a statement to The Associated Press hours after his killing.
Minnesota officials have lashed out at Mr. Trump and his team, too. “When I hear the officials from the Trump administration describe this video in ways that simply aren’t true, I just keep thinking, ‘Your eyes don’t lie,’” Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, said on “Meet the Press” on NBC on Sunday. “The American people aren’t sitting at a Trump cabinet meeting having to say everything to make him happy. They’re going to make their own judgments.”
Even some Republican lawmakers have been disturbed by the instantaneous jump to conclusions and the efforts to block inquiries that might contradict the government’s accounts. “Any administration official who rushes to judgment and tries to shut down an investigation before it begins are doing an incredible disservice to the nation and to President Trump’s legacy,” Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, wrote online.
Some administration officials sought to push back. “You cannot look at a 10-second video and judge what happened,” Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said on NBC. “You have to look at it from a full, full situation of what’s been happening in Minneapolis for the past several weeks, which is a simple fact.”
This is a president and an administration with credibility problems even before the agents sent to Minneapolis by Mr. Trump as part of a broad immigration crackdown shot Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti to death. Trump administration officials have issued misleading accounts of several incidents arising from confrontations involving federal officers in recent months.
In September, a jury in Los Angeles acquitted a protester of assaulting a federal officer after the defense argued that officers, including Mr. Bovino, had lied about what happened. In November, a federal judge in Illinois concluded that officials, including Mr. Bovino, had lied about the actions of protesters. Of 100 people charged with felony assault on federal agents in four Democratic-led cities from May to December, 55 saw their charges reduced or dismissed outright, according to an Associated Press examination.
Just last week, the White House posted a digitally doctored photo to make it appear that a Minnesota protester was crying when she was arrested, even though she was not. Rather than back down when caught dissembling, the White House has doubled down, essentially accusing anyone who challenges its version of the truth of siding with criminals.
In response to those who pointed out that the protester image was fake, Kaelan Dorr, a White House deputy communications director, wrote online: “YET AGAIN to the people who feel the need to reflexively defend perpetrators of heinous crimes in our country I share with you this message: Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue.”
Mr. Trump has a long record of dishonesty. He was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business documents, he was found liable in civil court of defrauding lenders, his family-owned business was convicted of criminal tax fraud, his charity was shut down after authorities found a “shocking pattern of illegality” and his self-named university paid out $25 million to settle complaints by students who called the school a sham.
While in office, Mr. Trump has been a prolific source of prevarication on any number of topics, so much so that The Washington Post counted more than 30,000 false or misleading statements in his first term. Most significantly, he repeatedly spread lies about supposed fraud in the 2020 elections that inspired a mob of supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to try to stop the transfer of power — and he continues to promote lies about those events to this day on a White House web page riddled with falsehoods and distortions.
Most Americans do not to take Mr. Trump at his word. Only 32 percent of Americans consider Mr. Trump to be honest and trustworthy, according to a survey this month by The Economist and YouGov. A Gallup study in his first term found that barely half as many Americans trusted Mr. Trump as they did Presidents George W. Bush or Barack Obama at similar points in their tenures.
While other presidents have been dishonest at times with the public, they have tended to worry that being caught saying something untrue, even if unintentionally, would detract from their public standing. Mr. Trump boldly and brazenly says things he knows or has been told are not true and even after being corrected continues to say them again and again.
“You say something enough times and it becomes true,” he once told Mary Pat Christie, the wife of Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, who has related his wife’s anecdote to associates. Stephanie Grisham, Mr. Trump’s former White House press secretary who has broken with him, recalled that he told her the same thing: “It doesn’t matter what you say, Stephanie — say it enough and people will believe you.”
John F. Kelly, the president’s longest-serving White House chief of staff in his first term, came to believe that Mr. Trump was a pathological liar. As Mr. Kelly has recounted, the president would sit with him and his press staff to go over what to tell reporters about some issue and Mr. Trump would try out lines without any regard for whether they were accurate or not. “But that’s not true,” Mr. Kelly would object. “But it sounds good,” Mr. Trump would reply.
The challenge for Mr. Trump at this point is the modern cellphone. There are scores or hundreds or more on the streets of Minneapolis these days and they are capturing at least a slice of reality regardless of the president’s storytelling. One of the central questions in American life today is whether a picture is worth more than a thousand of Mr. Trump’s words.
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He is covering his sixth presidency and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework.
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