Most people — especially public figures — take the responsibility of memorializing the dead seriously. Eulogies should summon our better angels. They can help us grieve, emphasizing our common humanity. They can inspire us to think about what we, the living, hope to leave behind.
In Minneapolis in January, two types of eulogy emerged. Where past presidents took care to honor the dead, this president and his top advisers instead besmirched their memories. It was left to ordinary Americans to play the role of public eulogist, extolling a loved one’s virtues not just to celebrate their lives, but also to rebut baseless accusations — made by some of the country’s most powerful people — suggesting that they deserved to die.
After Renee Good was killed by an ICE agent on Jan. 7, Vice President JD Vance described her actions before she was shot as “classic terrorism.” The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, used the term “domestic terrorism.” President Trump himself weighed in, saying, falsely, that Ms. Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer.”
Ms. Good’s grieving partner, Becca Good, wrote in the aftermath, “above all else, she was kind.” To express such a sentiment in memoriam was not unusual. But by the time her statement was made public, Becca Good’s task as a eulogist was not merely to memorialize. It was to defend.
With false charges as a backdrop, Becca Good’s eulogy reads not as a private remembrance, but as a public plea. With each quality she describes, her subtext is clear and wrenching: No matter what our government says, there’s no way someone this kind, compassionate and loving could be a terrorist.
Perhaps Michael and Susan Pretti had Becca Good’s nightmare on their mind when, last weekend, they released a written statement of their own. Less than 12 hours had passed since their son, Alex, had been shot at least 10 times at close range while restrained by Customs and Border Protection agents. Yet Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff, had already joined Secretary Noem in calling Alex Pretti a “domestic terrorist.” The F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, suggested, despite video evidence to the contrary, that Mr. Pretti had attacked the agents who subdued and shot him. Greg Bovino, then the public face of the Trump administration’s Minneapolis surge, said Mr. Pretti wanted to “massacre law enforcement.”
“Alex was a kindhearted soul,” his parents declared early in their statement, in an echo of Becca Good’s. By the next paragraph it diverged, making explicit the rebuttal that Ms. Good’s implied. “The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting,” it says. Where a typical eulogy ends with a note of fond recollection, this one ends with a direct appeal.
“Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man. Thank you.”
The families of Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti aren’t the first Americans to be told by law enforcement that their loved ones must have had it coming. Breonna Taylor. Eric Garner. Walter Scott. Laquan McDonald. Philando Castile. Tamir Rice. Freddie Gray. They and so many others have been subject to character assassination by public officials justifying their deaths.
The slander of the victims of the events in Minneapolis signals both an extension and an escalation of an old blemish on our national character. Ms. Good was a college-educated poet who had just dropped her son off at school. Mr. Pretti was an intensive-care nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital. Both were white.
Yet in the second Trump administration, even their traditional privilege was not enough to protect them from being shot and killed by law enforcement officers to whom they posed no clear threat — or from having their names dragged through the mud afterward.
The biggest change in Minneapolis was that smear campaigns that the families have been forced to rebut weren’t led by online trolls, or even by law enforcement. They were led by the Trump Administration. In each case, officials at the highest levels of government declared a protester killed by security forces to be an enemy of the state. Authoritarian regimes have always done this. Now, it’s part of American life.
How many more of these these desperate and furious pleas for a loved one’s dignity in the face of state slander, do we need to tolerate before we can agree that no one should have to write one? Anyone who has tried to find the words to do justice to a loved one’s memory should be able to empathize with the burden Ms. Good’s and Mr. Pretti’s families have been forced to bear.
There is some good news: America’s citizen eulogists appear, for the moment, to be winning, and the state propagandists are in retreat. Mr. Trump, who continues to insist that Mr. Pretti, rather than the agents who shot him, was responsible for his own tragic death, has sought to distance himself from some of his advisers’ most outrageous remarks. Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, issued the Trumpian version of an apology, pretending the worst smears never occurred.
Mr. Trump himself, perhaps recognizing the extent to which he misjudged the American people — or at least the political price he would pay for his language — tried talking about the need to “de-escalate.” But he then reposted a video of a previous confrontation between Mr. Pretti and federal agents, in an apparent attempt to suggest that an appropriate penalty for kicking a government vehicle is to be shot. A few days later, he called Mr. Pretti an “agitator, and perhaps, insurrectionist.”
So long as the president keeps forcing grieving families to rebut government smear campaigns, it’s hard to take seriously any talk of “turning down the temperature.” If Mr. Trump wants to end the American carnage he’s brought to Minneapolis — or just find an off-ramp for a politically disastrous blunder — he should start by apologizing to the families of Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti for the false accusations that he and his advisers deployed that compound their grief. Allow them to mourn in peace, and in private. Let them speak well of their dead.
I have never written a major presidential eulogy, although I was fortunate to work for a president who thought deeply about their meaning. “What a good man,” said President Barack Obama in 2015, remembering the Rev. Clementa Pinckney in Charleston, S.C. “Sometimes I think that’s the best thing to hope for when you’re eulogized — after all the words and recitations and résumés are read, to just say someone was a good man.”
America remains full of good people. What kind of president — what kind of administration — would dishonor their memories by pretending otherwise when they die?
David Litt was a speechwriter for President Barack Obama. He is the author, most recently, of “It’s Only Drowning: A True Story of Learning to Surf and the Search for Common Ground” and also writes the newsletter Word Salad.
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