"It Was a Clean Kill"

By John Woodford / Ann Arbor, Mich.

People protest against ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in downtown Minneapolis, 1/25/26

My plan for this story was to recount and ridicule Donald Trump’s most recent displays of monomaniacal egoism: his serial depositing of his name on various institutions, coins, doctrines, programs, titles, labels, logos and other receptacles.

Trump’s name game served as a butt of satire for a couple of weeks, diverting public attention from the ongoing conflict in Gaza and thereby interrupting our national debate over which term best describes that ongoing American carnage: Is it genocide, atrocity, ethnic cleansing or, um, a whatchamacallit?

But then came the January 3rd raid into Venezuela, the killing of a hundred or so security forces and a few stray civilians in Caracas, and the seizure of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores in their bedroom.

This caper presented a new semantic challenge to the analysts, panelists and talking heads cycling and recycling through our news media. Was this a “capture”? That’s the preferred term by both our openly right-wing and our supposed liberal mass media, because it signals to the public that the Maduros were drug-running terrorists despite the fact that no evidence of their criminality has been presented to any legal or judicial authority. Or was their seizure an “arrest,” a “regime-change” a “coup,” a “profitable oil acquisition,” an act of “piracy” or, um, a whichamajig?

Some members of the U.S.’ highly trained and high-tech armed troops provided a preview of what was to come in Minneapolis: They punched out Mrs. Maduro, aged 69, who must have called them a name or taken a swing at them or tried to run away. For a while, you could fairly easily find photos showing her with bandages on her head and eye, but you’ll have a harder time finding those images now. She feared she might have broken ribs, too, her attorney said, and her ribs were X-rayed, but I’ve found no reports on the extent of those injuries.

No sooner, however, had our legacy media (or mainstream media, monopoly media or corporate mass media) sunk its teeth into the semantic challenges presented by our country’s Venezuelan adventure than new blood was shed more abundantly on the trail: the blood of Renee Good in Minneapolis.

Just four days after Caracas, the news pack raised its assorted muzzles and swiftly gave chase to the latest demonstration of federal might. Most coverage echoed the pronouncements of the Chief Howler in Charge (CHIC). Some amplified his approval of the shooting. Others undercut public protests that the ICE agent who killed Ms. Good, Jonathan Ross, should be charged with a crime by devoting hours of programming to the question of how far and when she turned the front wheels of her vehicle away from her killer.

“It is a horrible thing to watch,” President Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social very shortly after watching early videos of the shooting. “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.” Oh, the horror! Trump immediately ordered that Minnesota’s state investigators should have no access to evidence or suspects in the case.

To the President and his supporters, the worst aspects of the mini blitzkrieg was not seeing an unarmed mother shot three times in the head as she attempted to drive away. No. what was “horrible” was having to hear women speak boldly, the victim cheerfully saying, “I don’t hate you,” and her partner not screaming but saying in a needling tone, “You want to come at us? You want to come at us? Go get yourself some lunch, big boy.” Listen to the recordings yourselves and decide if you hear a scream. Nevertheless, here’s a typical headline by the openly subservient and blood lusting segment of our news media: “Renee Nicole Good’s wife screams ‘drive baby, drive’ just seconds before ICE agent shoots her in dramatic footage taken from his phone” (New York Post, Jan. 9).

Shucks, fellas, you know how women’s voices — being higher-pitched and all–can sound like a scream when they’re saying something you don’t like, right? Women! If they’re not elite, a guy can just “grab them by the pussy; you can do anything,” as Trump observed during the years when he was developing the qualities that led to his two electoral victories. Now we know just how far “anything” can extend.

Lawrence Jones, a co-host of TV’s Fox & Friends, was on that network’s program assessing the Minneapolis shooting a few hours after Good died. Summing up the evidence as the President, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem (Good “was a domestic terrorist”) and Fox reporters had described it, Jones concluded, “It was a clean kill.” Other politicians and media figures have used the same term in the weeks after the atrocity. So, let’s look at what a “clean kill” means to people interested in the finer points of that accomplishment.

“For an Operator Kill to be considered as a Clean Kill, you must finish off your target without sustaining any damage from them, whether from bullets, explosives or melee attacks.” (Source, OneEsports, in a discussion of the simulated violence in the online game Modern Warfare 3)

“The assassin liked to make a clean kill and thus favored small arms over explosives”. (Source wordow.com 2026)

As Ross strode away from his scene toward the car in which he and his partner would leave the scene of his “clean kill,” he glared into the candid camera and snarled this valediction at his victim: “Fuckin’ bitch!”

And 17 days later, the current administration's excuse for "lawmen" killed again in Minneapolis. This time the victim was Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old off-duty ICU nurse who was trying to protect tear-gassed protesters from assault by ICE agents. Pretti had a licensed firearm on his person, but did not draw it in videos of the skirmish, contrary to claims by the President and his minions. Pretti was obviously restrained by the federal agents when he was shot 10 times.

What we are being urged, seduced, conditioned into thinking or feeling, my dear fellow Americans, is that citizens who stand up on their hind legs and voice their disapproval of actions taken in their name in this land of, by and for the people, can be — even deserve to be— seized, beaten, jailed, tortured, shot.

If you’re looking to the Democratic Party hierarchy and regulars to confront and resist these authoritarian measures for you, just remember, they voted 99 to 0 for Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, Bernie Sanders included. And what do you hear them saying about the ongoing genocide in Gaza? They’re as happy to have it out of the news media as Trump is.

Speaking of Gaza, Arabs are known to have a keen fondness for proverbs, aphorisms, maxims and adages — pithy verbal expressions passed down via oral traditions for centuries.

Proverbs express moral lessons and offer guidance in how we assess social situations and how we try to live our lives. Here’s one that’s apt for our country and others here and now:

“They asked Pharaoh: ’What made you so pharaonic?’ He said, “I didn’t find anyone to restrain me.”

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John Woodford lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he retired after two decades as the executive editor of Michigan Today, a University of Michigan alumni/ae publication. His career in journalism includes editing and/or reporting duties for Ebony magazine, Muhammad Speaks newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times, the New Haven Register, the New York Times and Ford Motor company publications.