Alex Pretti is The Man on Fifth Avenue, his murder brings the Trump Decade to a Resounding Close
Two weeks before the Iowa caucuses in the winter Trump traveled to an arena in Sioux Center, Iowa on January 23, 2016. Trump was visiting Dordt College, a small unremarkable Christian college to give one of his, by-then, typical rally speeches. As NPR described it at the time:
With less than two weeks to go until the Iowa caucus, Donald Trump remains characteristically confident about his chances. In fact, the Republican front-runner is so confident, he says his supporters would stay loyal even if he happened to commit a capital offense.
"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" Trump remarked at a campaign stop at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa. "It's, like, incredible."
The businessman, whose Trump Tower stands on the major Manhattan thoroughfare, cracked the joke Saturday to a receptive audience at the Christian college.
Reached by CNN immediately after the event, Trump declined to clarify the statement. On Twitter, he remarked on the rally, saying, "Just left Sioux Center, Iowa. My speech was very well received. Truly great people! Packed house — overflow!"
By now the press had fallen into the rhythms of his stemwinding speeches. Trump would bounce along at a lectern in these carnivals, which were part tent revival, part comedy routine, and part cult conditioning. Trump rallies had the superfan elements of Phish or Grateful Dead, with fans building an entire ecosystem, love language and lifestyle around his merchandise and content. Trump built the bond by aiming a cruel and cutting stream of insults toward a shared adversary: liberal Americans. The rallies would be ominously successful at scaffolding a super structure for the cult around shared civic space, albeit to spew bile and insults at their perceived domestic enemies.
For most of the 1990s Trump was best described as a cultural gadfly. He had consistently promised to run for office for ten years or more. But it was understood by the press and the New York society pages, as a ploy for media attention and a lazy money-making scheme. His most cherished ventures. Black New Yorkers had long known to be distrustful and wary of this man. He was an outer borough slumlord from Jamaica, Queens who violated housing discrimination laws routinely. Trump also took out ads in papers to belligerently asking for the so-called "Central Park Five" to receive the death penalty. Of course, this means that they were completely innocent. But his race-baiting ways were well known, if disturbingly mainstream and unremarkable for the times.
But Trump could get away with saying something outlandish because he has burnished his image as something of a rapscallion. Trump was broke from a series of catastrophic casino business failures. When NBC tapped him to helm their new reality show "The Apprentice", he and his family were more "playing billionaires at parties" than having any actual wealth. Mark Burnett would rebuild and edit him into looking like a decisive and powerful businessman presiding over an empire from a fake office full of thirsty contestants clamoring for an opportunity in Hollywood.
For years the audience that would show up to these rallies had developed a parasocial relationship with this peculiar man. They came to hear him "play the hits" whether saying "Lock Her Up" about Hillary Clinton, his opponent, or talking about Obama's birth certificate, or trying to play consultant advising Democrats to select Bernie (when all he really wanted to do was sow intraparty conflict). During the 2016 campaign his ubiquitous, tireless and shameless courting of the media gave them something to program large swaths of empty midday hours when attention waned. Trump, was to the ways of the media, would schedule his rallies to maximize these times on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox.
But hours long rallies need some "magic" to keep people on their toes and coming back for more. People partly tuned in to hear Trump say outlandish, deviant, and taboo things. That's why Trump would feed the American people a steady diet of strange aphorisms like "I like people who aren't captured, okay?" when talking about prisoners of war. Or acting out the mannerisms of a New York Times reporter with a congential condition which limited the use of his arms.
Thus when Trump said that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue it was shocking and inappropriate. But it was also seen as an event that increased the in-group bonding of his supporters into a cult. Trump would test his audience to applaud and approve of his remarks, even if they were outlandish, especially if they were outlandish. Thus NPR described it as a "joke" that was "well received." In fact, the sinister boast worked its magic. It spread across the media, gained attention, and enervated his liberal opponents. What Trump would certain view as a win-win-win.
For a decade, Trump has acted inside the framework of this boast. He has consistently pushed the outer bounds of the law while shattering the norms. The idea of a president bragging that he could actually kill people was unthinkable because no former president, or even party candidate, would say something so dark and disturbing. The boast did what Trump wanted it to do. It marked him as a bold and unfiltered person, but also a menacing threat and bully, willing to "get rough and tough" with the liberals.
He found a tremendously receptive audience for this kind of vengeance politics. Arguably, this single sentence truly opened his eyes to "manifesting" the kind of political persona he truly wanted to display: a man of unstoppable power, unconstrained by any law or norm. He would go one to say that he wanted to "knock the hell out of people" who came to his rallies to protest. He said that cops should "get rough" with arrested suspects even suggesting they have their heads banged on the car doors.
He would, of course, win the 2016 election and assume the presidency on a cold January day in 2017. Before an assembled audience of glittering DC power brokers and appalled and shell shocked Democrats, he gave a speech dubbed "American Carnage." In this inaugural address he would describe America as a wasteland of destruction and destitution. Famously, George W. Bush, in attendance and seated next to Michelle Obama, would review the speech with a quip: "That was some weird shit."
But if we see American Carnage as the roadmap built on the mission statement that he could shoot anyone he wanted in the middle of one of the busiest American streets and not suffer any adverse consequences, it becomes an articulation of the Trump Decade. He has always been this person from before a single vote being cast. Before the Iowa Caucus had even been held.
So it has been for the last ten years. Trump arguably has been the most hateful and spiteful person to live in this county, much less lead it. Although he had an interregnum when Biden cleaned up his messes from Trump I, he never truly went away for long. He set about raising money, decrying a stolen election, holding court from Mar-A-Lago, and reviewing his successor's every move with assurances that if he had been president a bad thing would not have happened, or a good thing would be better. He also spent time priming the cult to reject all evidence of their eyes and ears about the state of the economy, society and culture.
Trump II has been a blowtorch of rage and bile in which the guardrails that creaked and wobbled and bent in his first term have snapped and blown away. He has spun a chaos wheel to select which issue to obliterate the world with on a daily basis. Trump has designed his second presidency, if you could use that term, to truly run as a mafia-state, with himself as a godfather. His strategy, whether domestic or international, is to strongarm his opponent with threats of ruination. Tariffs, NATO defense, Venezuela, Ukraine, Crypto, White House "renovations", the Nobel Peace Prize, Pardons, and of course Immigration Enforcement, have all been approached from a position of blustering belligerence and threats. Do what I tell you or I will shoot the hostage.
He has often lost in court. A fact sometimes forgotten by his exhausted and downtrodden opposition. But he has succeeded throughout 2025 in literally bulldozing his opponents, as he did when he tore down the East Room of the White House without any permission or planning. American simply woke up to a construction vehicles demolishing a space that had been the working quarters of First Ladies, and a contained an East Room ballroom wholly insuffient to contain Trump's personality.
He spent all of 2025 escalating his misconduct and watching his Congressional opponents locked in the minority look on helpelessly. He had found himself a Speaker of the House who was willing to effectively cede all of the branch's power to him. With his 6-3 Supreme Court, full of ideologues (who cherished his racism) and cowards (who feared he might actually have them killed), he neutered the judicial branch, paving the way for his unaccountable behavior. By ruling that he had effectively total immunity from prosecution, the judicial branch told him that he could act as an imperious monarch.
Trump faced one act of hostility from this captive Congress, he signed a law requiring him to produce all the Epstein files in his possession redacted for privacy. He then set about to block, delay and distract from their release. He then "celebrated" January 6, with the MAGA cult rewriting the history of the event to cast the insurrectionists as patriots, the police as jack-booted thugs, and the Democrats as blood-thirsty fascists seeking to destroy good-hearted MAGA Americans who just loved their country. It was an ominous sign that 2026 would be no better, and perhaps considerably worse than 2025.
On January 7, Renee Nicole Good was shot three times by an ICE officer, Jonathan Ross, after an interaction in her Minneapolis neighborhood. Good, a mother who had dropped off her six year old at school, was in a red SUV while her partner and Ross took turns filming each other. Ross didn't speak but circled around Good's vehicle taking video with his personal phone. Good up close said that she wasn't mad at him. Within twenty seconds of saying this to him he would shoot her three times. Once in the forearm from the front of her windshield. Once from the side through her right breast missing all vital organs. Once through her temple and into her head. Renee's car accelerated forward and crashed and she died in a pool of blood while dozens looked on at her car. He finally did derisively exclaim "Fucking bitch!" as he car crashed a hundred yards away.
This murder in the streets of Minnesota poured forth collective rage and action in the city and across the country. The Trump administration attempted to lie and smear Good and her partner with lies about her conduct. While video from multiple sources, including Ross himself, show her as attempting to avoid an escalation and altercation with ICE by driving away from the scene. Trump seemed to careen around for a theory of what he could get away with saying about Good. He went from calling her a person doing bad things to someone who was probably good. All predicated on his watching TV and seeing angry protests, which accelerated during MLK National Day of Service and Action. Pictures of Renee, smiling and genial, put a lie to the administration's efforts to characterize her as a violent and unhinged maniac.
But it would be January 24, 2026, that we would reach the end of the Trump decade in a horrifying, nauseating manner. Ten years and one day after his speech in Sioux Center, Iowa. For on this Saturday morning in America, ICE officers would murder Alex Jeffrey Pretti, by shooting him ten times in a South Minneapolis street. Pretti had been shielding two women whom ICE officers had shoved and pepper sprayed. He held a camera in one hand and a free hand used to stop the officers from spraying chemical irritants in their faces. He attempted to pick up a fallen woman and get officers to retreat away from them. Instead, they descended on him in force, tackling him and knocking him down. They seized his holstered firearm which he never drew himself. Then they shot him ten times in a hail of bullets from point blank range.
Here it is. Trump, who bragged that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue finally delivered on his promise. As President of the United States. As architect of this immigration enforcement apparatus. As the head of Operation Metro Surge. He the bullet he fired in 2016 found its target. Alex Jeffrey Pretti, aged thirty-seven A beloved ICU nurse for veterans in their final days. A dog owner. A mountain biker. An outdoorsman. A son of Green Bay, Wisconsin. A human being. I will not repeat the lies they told about him. The names they called him. But I will say that his death has brought an end to their decade. He will never be seen the same again. He is a violent scoundrel. He must resign.
