This was a week that shook Minnesota, one that ripped open old wounds while inflicting deeply painful new ones. A week that follows a tumultuous and often traumatic past several months, and years.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz summed up how many in the state are feeling as they reel from an onslaught of profoundly difficult news.
“Look, we’re exhausted. We’re exhausted as Minnesotans. We’re exhausted as Americans,” Walz said during a news conference Thursday. “And this relentless assault on Minnesota for whatever reason, is just cruel. So please just give us a break.”
The week began with an ominous tone, as President Donald Trump shared on social media a video spreading a false, debunked conspiracy theory that Walz was involved in the assassination of Democratic state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman.
Walz and the Hortman’s adult children chastised the president, with Walz calling him “dangerous and depraved,” as they and others urged Trump to take down the post. He didn’t.
On Monday, Walz stunned voters across the state by ending his campaign for what could have been a record third term in office, just months after kicking off his reelection bid. The announcement came amid growing federal scrutiny of fraud in Minnesota’s social service programs, which exploded into a national news story.
Trump’s administration was already in the midst of building up the federal law enforcement presence in Minnesota, with a surge of some 2,000 officers and agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Federal Bureau of Investigation to launch more immigration enforcement actions and to investigate allegations of social services fraud.
On Tuesday, Walz came out swinging.
“The war that’s being waged against Minnesota, you’re seeing it. We have a ridiculous surge of apparently 2,000 people not coordinating with us that are for a show of the cameras,” Walz said. “If you want us to fix fraud, come and help us. Come and help us do that. They’re not interested in that.”
On Wednesday, a Republican-led Congressional committee added their partisan scrutiny to Minnesota’s fraud scandals in Washington, where Minnesota's first district GOP congressman Brad Finstad blamed Walz.
“These fraudsters preyed on the goodwill of Minnesotans,” Finsted said. “Minnesota is Minnesota Nice, and these fraudsters knew it, and they took advantage of us.”
As that hearing was taking place in Washington, a shocking tragedy was unfolding back in Minneapolis, as an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Macklin Good in her car as she tried to drive away from officers. The 37-year old mother of three had just recently moved to the Twin Cities.
Bystander videos showed the horrific shooting. And almost immediately, competing narratives emerged. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem immediately contended that the officer acted in self defense.
“The act like we saw today of using a vehicle to try to kill an officer and his colleagues and the other people around him, is something that every politician, every elected official, everyone in this country, should be able to rally around and say that it is wrong,” Noem said Wednesday.
On Thursday, despite videos showing evidence to the contrary, Vice President JD Vance doubled down on the self defense narrative.
“She was trying to ram this guy with her car, he shot back, he defended himself,” Vance said in the White House briefing room Thursday. “I can believe that her death is a tragedy, while also recognizing that it’s a tragedy of her own making.”
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey used strong words of his own in describing the self defense argument as “garbage.”
“Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly, that is bulls—t!” Frey exclaimed in a Wednesday news conference. “This was an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying.”
“To ICE, get the f—k out of Minneapolis,” Frey added.
As sad and angry Minnesotans now march the streets in protest in Minneapolis, Rochester, Duluth, Mankato and other cities across the state, politicians are pleading for calm. And Minnesota, once again, is in mourning.
Father Daniel Griffith is pastor and rector of The Basilica of St. Mary who gave the homily at Melissa and Mark Hortman’s funeral mass. He says the Twin Cities is once again at the center of the nation’s attention, and Minnesotans are dealing with another shared trauma, while still not fully healed from George Floyd’s murder, the killing of the Hortmans and the Annunciation school shooting.
“I think out of the ashes can come, eventually come restoration, but there’s a lot of hard work to do,” Griffith told MPR News. “And we’re at a place where the political climate and divisions are so acute and polarization is so acute that getting folks in a room together to share in really authentic and respectful dialog is very, very challenging.”
But Griffith, who is also a fellow at the St. Thomas School of Law and founding director of the Initiative on Restorative Justice and Healing, believes there is hope for healing from this collective trauma.
“We have an inherent dignity in that we can come together to really kind of stitch together a future that's more humane and more just and more peaceful,” Griffith said. “And I think there’s enough leaders in Minnesota who would be committed to that across political divides.”
Writer and podcaster Sharon McMahon of Duluth says she’s continually struck by Minnesotans’ ability to come together for the common good.
“We might not always agree on how something should have played out. We might not always agree on what the right move was in the moment, but we do have a long shared history of caring about our neighbors,” McMahon said.
“This is part of our heritage as Minnesotans, and despite these big, flashy headline events that do inflict collective trauma on us as Minnesotans, I am always buoyed by Minnesotans’ ability to come together and do what is right for their communities.”
McMahon, a best-selling author who is known as “America’s government teacher,” stressed that maintaining hope is essential right now.
“That is a far more productive place for us than if we sit around waiting for this feeling to descend upon us from above, or for good news to ride in on a white horse,” McMahon said.
“We have no choice but to continue to hope, because the opposite of that is to sink into despair and cynicism, and history teaches us over and over that that will never lead us somewhere we want to be.”
