Transcript - America This Week, Jan 9, 2026: "Descent Into Chaos: The Minnesota Shooting"

Matt equivocates and Walter does not as news of the Renee Good shooting comes in. Plus, a surprise new novel

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to American This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn, talking at twice the speed because you did. Well, we’re trying to cram a lot of content in here. We’re trying to deliver more value to people. So the news of the day is that there is another shooting, not the first one that has taken place in Minnesota. And let’s get into some video. Let’s look at the first clip.

Matt Taibbi: Okay. So there’s that. That can be interpreted in a number of ways or it can’t. Why was

Walter Kirn: She parked Crosswise on the road?

Matt Taibbi: Well, this is part of the insight that I’m going to try to impart in a moment, but

Walter Kirn: It- Then I’ll just note that she was parked Crosswise on the road. On the icy road of Minnesota, which I’ve driven all through my youth, those

Matt Taibbi: Icy roads. So we’re basically consuming this as people do on the media, on social media. We’re getting disembodied bits of things and we don’t know what lots of things mean.

Walter Kirn: But we do know there was someone there with a camera ready to film it.

Matt Taibbi: Right. That was true. Yes. But why was she parked that way? Why was she being stopped? What’s the operation? Okay. All right. Let’s look at a slowed down version, which a lot of people have done. There’s been lots of meta analyses of this.

Walter Kirn: The guy in front got hit.

Matt Taibbi: The guy in front ... So that’s one of the problems with the video is that you don’t see the whole thing now. The third one, I think, shows that.

Walter Kirn: Well, that guy got brushed off the front

Matt Taibbi: Side bumper. On that side, you can sort of see that there’s a person in front of the car, right?

Walter Kirn: Yeah, I can see it clearly.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Okay. So everybody walls up off into different camps immediately about this. Let’s look at Jacob Frey. This is the mayor of Minneapolis who has stern words to say.

Jacob Frey: There’s little I can say again that’ll make this situation better, but I do have a message for our community, for our city, and I have a message for ICE. To ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here. Your stated reason for being in this city is to create some kind of safety and you are doing exactly the opposite. People are being hurt. Families are being ripped apart. Long-term Minneapolis residents that have contributed so greatly to our city, to our culture, to our economy are being terrorized, and now somebody is dead.

Speaker 6: I’ve seen a lot of Republicans here in Washington criticizing those comments, saying that you’re escalating tensions with that. Can you respond to them? And what do you say to them tonight? People who criticize those comments.

Jacob Frey: I’m so sorry if I offended their Disney princess ears, but here’s the thing. If we’re talking about what’s inflammatory, on the one hand, you got someone who dropped an F-bomb, and on the other hand, you got someone who killed somebody else. F-bomb, killing somebody. I think the more inflammatory action is killing somebody. And so once again, let’s be real and just honest and straight up about what’s happening here. This is not okay.

Walter Kirn: This is idiocracy. That whole appeal to kind of basic locker room rhetoric, as far as I’m concerned, what an actor he is.

Matt Taibbi: Well, we’ll get to that in a second. Let’s get through all the different actors. Let’s see Kristi Noem

Kristi Noem: At 10:25 AM Central Time, immigration and customs enforcement were carrying out lawful operations here in Minneapolis. Because of the adverse weather that Minneapolis has seen in recent snow, one of the vehicles became stuck and ensnared in the snow. Law enforcement were attempting to push out this vehicle and when a mob of agitators that were harassing them all day began blocking them in, shouting at them and impeding law enforcement operations. ICE officers and agents approached the vehicle of the individual in question who was blocking the officers in with her vehicle, and she had been stalking and impeding their work all throughout the day. ICE agents repeatedly ordered her to get out of the car and to stop obstructing law enforcement, but she refused to obey their commands. She then proceeded to weaponize her vehicle, and she attempted to run a law enforcement officer over. This appears as an attempt to kill or to cause bodily harm to agents, an act of domestic terrorism.

The ICE officer fearing for his life and the other officers around him, and the safety of the public fired defensive shots. He used his training to save his own life and that of his colleagues. In fact, the very same officer who was attacked today had previously been dragged by an anti-ice rioter who had rammed him with a car and drug him back in June. He sustained injuries at that time as well. It’s very clear that this individual was harassing and impeding law enforcement operations. Our officer followed his training, did exactly what he’s been taught to do in that situation and took actions to defend himself and defend his fellow law enforcement officers. The officer was hit by the vehicle. She hit him. He went to the hospital. A doctor did treat him. He has been released, but he’s going to spend some time with his family.

Matt Taibbi: Okay. And then lastly, a tweet from Trump, I think this is number eight. This is Trump saying, “I’ve just viewed the clip of the event, which took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is a horrible thing to watch. 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. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive.”

Walter Kirn: That’s a bit of an exaggeration. He didn’t look like someone who had been maybe fatally injured.

Matt Taibbi: Yes. Right. It’s an exaggeration. It’s the President of the United States looking at a clip and responding to it. It’s to a degree, I think a lot of the other folks are doing the same thing. And I spent years of my life covering police brutality, incidents, shootings, stranglings. I don’t think there was a vehicular homicide or a vehicular attack incident, but there was such a wide range of these incidents. And the one constant in all of them is that the end picture never accords with what you think in the first moments.

Walter Kirn: What do you mean the end picture? You mean the results of an investigation never?

Matt Taibbi: When you finally get all the different facts in about what you’re looking at, which is usually a disembodied piece of video that circulates often because somebody on social media has got it, and in many cases, the actual media is only reporting on something that they’ve grabbed from social media. So you don’t always know what you’re looking at. You don’t always know what the person who filmed the scene was doing.

Walter Kirn: You don’t know what the expression on the face of the victim was, or it’s hard to know what was being screamed

Matt Taibbi: Either. What was being screamed, what was being said, what the situation was, but we’re in this world where everybody sort of goes to the mattresses immediately and takes sides and often they’re arguing about different things. So Jacob Frey talking about ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis. Now, if you want to argue about the ICE program, you can, but if you want to talk about the specific shooting, I think it’s prudent to wait a couple of days at least, or maybe even until there’s an indictment to find out all the different relevant

Walter Kirn: Matt, that’s so 1986.