Trump repeats baseless claim that Renee Good was part of ‘leftwing network’ of paid agitators | Donald Trump
At the White House on Friday, Donald Trump backed his vice president’s baseless claim that Renee Good, the 37-year-old woman killed Wednesday by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, was part of a shadowy “left-wing network” attempting to “incite violence” against federal agents.
Asked by a Fox News correspondent to expand on JD Vance’s comments about Good, the president said the vice president “is usually very accurate” and then cited what he called evidence that at least one person in Good’s vicinity when she was killed was “probably a paid agitator.”
The claim that none of the protesters opposing his mass eviction campaign are motivated by the horror of what is being done to their neighbors, but must be paid agents, is a familiar one for Trump, who has made it repeatedly in recent months.
In Good’s case, Trump focused on the fact that in the video of federal agents killing her, recorded by a witness, someone could be heard shouting the word “shame” several times, indicating to him that this person must be “a professional troublemaker.”
“I looked at that,” Trump said. “There was a woman shouting: ‘Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!’ She was a[n] agitator, probably a paid agitator, but in my opinion she was an agitator, a very high level agitator, therefore professional. She kept screaming.
It was unclear whether the person who yelled “shame” at ICE agents at least 10 times during the incident was the one who recorded the video or someone who was standing next to her. But the president’s assertion that only a paid agitator would be able to shout down ICE agents carrying out immigration raids on the streets of American cities is contradicted by hundreds of recorded incidents over the past year.
The video shows a witness to Good’s murder yelling “shame” at officers at two different locations. First, the person shouted the word twice as officers attempted to remove Good from his vehicle, then opened fire.
A short time later, as the person recording the incident approached the officer who killed Good, their voice, or that of someone behind them, could be heard shouting the warning eight more times to him as he walked away from the scene.
The president also complained that the person’s horrified screams made it difficult for him to watch the video of the murder on television.
“The news kind of dismissed her, discouraged her because you try to watch – she was so loud and so crazy and just not normal,” he said.
“When someone sees something like that,” he said, referring to the point-blank shooting of a neighbor, “they don’t scream and say the same words. So, I guess you could say, professional, but I don’t think she did a very good job.”
“You have agitators,” the president concluded, “and we will always protect ICE, and we will always protect our Border Patrol and our law enforcement.”
