The news is getting truly bizarre.
“…I learned that her parents, and her father in particular… I hope he still is, but I don’t know, [he] was a tremendous Trump fan,” he said. “He was all for Trump. Loved Trump, and it’s terrible.”
[…]
“I was told that by a lot of people,” said Trump, referring to his comments about Good’s father. “They said, ‘Oh, he loves you’ … I hope he still feels that way.”
The grieving and heartbroken father is being pressured, implicitly and publicly, to affirm his loyalty to the administration whose agents killed his daughter. False claims by the White House about a “domestic terrorist” suddenly evaporated and become a “tragedy” the moment the victim’s family turned out to be politically aligned.
The Romans called it hostis versus civis – the enemy who exists outside law’s protection versus people within. Trump is overtly calling for a split within American families based on political loyalty, making citizenship rights revocable based on response to state violence against their own.
In Stalinist show trials, families were required to publicly denounce executed relatives to avoid classification as enemies. The Chinese Cultural Revolution demanded similar performances. The mechanism is the same: force the family to choose between mourning their dead and maintaining their own protected status. The public nature isn’t incidental – it’s the point. Other families are meant to see the choice being imposed.
One infamous American example, as dramatized in “to strike at a king” and “Good Night, and Good Luck“, was Milo Radulovich. The Air Force Reserve lieutenant was dismissed, not for anything he did, but because his father subscribed to a foreign-language newspaper and his sister allegedly went to political meetings. The military demanded he denounce his family to keep his commission. He refused. Public exposure in 1953 of the loyalty-test mechanism generated enough pressure to reverse it.
Trump’s claim he “was told that by a lot of people” about political affiliations reveals they are reported as operationally relevant information to him. That’s further evidence of how the system splits the country now, intentionally aiming for separate and unequal treatment of Americans.
The loyalty test of the family members establishes that compliance is rewarded. And then normalization of the state violence establishes that any resistance carries risk.
The current “it just happens” framing of Trump converts an act of deadly force by a federal agent into something akin to lightning – unfortunate, unavoidable, without accountability. Combined with the DOJ shutting down the civil rights investigation while simultaneously subpoenaing Governor Walz, the political storm is clear: Trump will investigate those who document or resist an execution, but not the executioner.
Six federal prosecutors resigned over that decision. That’s something important to families under pressure to prove loyalty while their children are executed by the state.