Trump’s war on truth misfired this week.
The shot that killed Renee Nicole Good on Jan. 7 can not be silenced, though the attempt to do so has been monumental.
This may be the one. This may be the crack that finally crumbles the tower of lies that has been growing taller and taller since Trump entered politics.
Remember, the reality show star’s political career started with a lie, the Birther Conspiracy. He contended that Barack Obama couldn’t be president because he wasn’t born in the United States. Even after Obama produced his birth certificate, Trump continued to beat the foreigner drum, and his cultish supporters listened and followed.
But the most telling lie came right after the start of Trump’s first term in office. In his book “A Higher Loyalty,” former FBI Director James Comey recalls a meeting at CIA headquarters where Trump gathered all his cronies and declared with a straight face how thrilled he was that his inauguration was the biggest in history, bigger than Obama’s.
Trump said that and made eye contact with his folks. Comey recognized this as a typical mobster move: stating an obvious lie and looking around to get confirmation, suggesting that “we’re all in on this, right?”
The news media generally pointed out the disparity between what Trump said and what we could all see with our eyes. But there was a collective shrug. Trump had always been a bit of a huckster, with a pension for exaggeration, part of his charm and bravado, and if he wants to believe his inauguration was the biggest ever, what’s the harm?
Trump’s attacks on reality continued, turning against the idea of experts who might disagree with him: Medical experts who promoted vaccines. Scientists who advanced clear proof that global climate change was human caused and going to get worse if we didn’t cut back on greenhouse gas emissions.
Gaslighting became the hallmark of Trump’s rule, and I call it rule, because he left the bounds of the American presidency a long time ago. Unchecked by Congress or the Supreme Court, he has become a dictator, like Putin, like Kim Jong Un, leaders he has long admired.
Trump’s ability to get his base to buy into his version of reality has put him on this throne. He’s exactly what George Orwell warned us about, a totalitarian who not only wants to control what we believe but what we think.
Trump marked the recent anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection by trying to rewrite history, suggesting it was the Capitol Police responsible for the violence, and all the brutal insurrectionists were patriots.
When people lie, cheat or even kill for Trump, they get rewarded, not punished.
And so, once again on Wednesday, Trump and his cronies pulled out a giant package of lies in a grand attempt to persuade us that what we saw with our own eyes – a mother driving home from dropping her kid off at school murdered by a masked thug – wasn’t what actually happened.
Good was a terrorist who drove over a well-trained and restrained ICE officer, who’s lucky to be alive.
The New York Times smartly posted a frame by frame examination of the incident. She clearly was not even trying to drive into the agents. She was just trying to get away.
And Renee Nicole Good, an American citizen with no ties to terrorist groups, was assassinated by one of Trump’s secret police.
Seeing comments on The Gazette article about Good’s murder, it’s clear that at least the core of Trump’s MAGA base are buying his BS.
As one commentator chillingly wrote: “Stop glorifying her. She was an activist who didn’t obey authority.”
Right. As Mr. Orwell wrote, it’s dangerous for those in a totalitarian society who do not obey.
But I have faith that this time, the vast American public will look at the videos and believe their own eyes.
This will not be swept under the rug with the Epstein files. This defense of the indefensible may be the call that our better angels need to rise up.
Few have captured that spirit better than National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman:
For Renee Nicole Good
Killed by I.C.E. on January 7, 2026
They say she is no more,
That there her absence roars,
Blood-blown like a rose.
Iced wheels flinched & froze.
Now, bare riot of candles,
Dark fury of flowers,
Pure howling of hymns.
If for us she arose,
Somewhere, in the pitched deep of our grief,
Crouches our power,
The howl where we begin,
Straining upon the edge of the crooked crater
Of the worst of what we’ve been.
Change is only possible,
& all the greater,
When the labour
& bitter anger of our neighbors
Is moved by the love
& better angels of our nature.
What they call death & void,
We know is breath & voice;
In the end, gorgeously,
Endures our enormity.
You could believe departed to be the dawn
When the blank night has so long stood.
But our bright-fled angels will never be fully gone,
When they forever are so fiercely Good.
The Epstein Files is a regular Bulletin column featuring Warren Epstein’s take on politics, food, the arts and whatever else is on his mind. There will always be one mention of President Donald Trump as a confirmation that yes, Trump is in The Epstein Files. As Bulletin board chair, Epstein does not accept pay for his writing here.
