Bulwark Takes - The White House is Scrambling to Contain Fallout Over Minneapolis Killing

Episode Date: January 26, 2026

Sam Stein and Andrew Egger give their takes on the fallout from the White House after top officials like Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and Greg Bovino called Alex Pretti a “would‑be assassin” and “domestic terrorist” in the minutes after federal agents shot and killed him in Minneapolis even as video evidence and witness accounts contradicted them. As the Trump team scrambles to change the narrative, Bovino has been moved out of his Minneapolis role.

Hey, everyone. It's me, Sam Stein, managing out of the bulwark. Still unshaven after this weekend. I probably should have shaved because I look pathetic. You look great. That clean cut, Christmas sweater wearing, Washington Commanders have wearing, and Drager of morning trots. What's up, man? How you doing? I haven't, I haven't shaven either. You just can't tell on account of my condition. Andrew is actually only 16 years old. We're here to talk about something serious, which is The White House of Peers. I'm putting air quotes around a peers. I will debate how serious this is to be walking back or trying to find an off ramp or whatever cliche you want to use where they are in Minneapolis. And Andrew, I'm going to talk about how serious we think it is. So first indications came this morning, Andrew, when it was announced that Tom Homan, who has been sort of on the outs on the Border Patrol, was going to be deputized. more or less to run the show in Minneapolis. We got this bleat from President Trump that said

Homan's now the guy in charge. He's hanging over there. A bit of a change. We had some internal discussions about how significant it is, and you and I were actually in agreement that it was significant. Can you explain why? Yeah. So basically what we're getting out of this, it's not just that Homan is going in there. Every indication we're getting is that he is in and Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol kind of villain who's been running. The stuff there. Yeah, little guy, Nazi haircut, big leather coat, he is going to be out. He's no longer going to be running the day-to-day of this. It's a little strange because Tom Homan, kind of in like the sort of just lay resistance imagination is a guy they hate, not for no reason, right? I mean, this is the guy who got,

you know, the $50,000 in the Kava bag. Allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly got that. This is a guy who's like constantly on TV, you know, doing the Tough Guy Act on behalf of the administration's border policies. But behind the scenes, as far as like the spectrum of, of like, DHS decision makers is concerned, he is a lot of not insane people consider him to be somewhat more sane, somewhat more experienced and disciplined than the people who are currently running the show, Bovino, and especially DHS Secretary Christy Noem and her boy toy, Cory Lewandowski. Oh, and the other thing is that Homan and Nome do not get along. Homan has been sort of ostracized and frozen out of this whole thing by

Noam and Lewandowski in recent months. So when it was announced that Holman was going to go in and take over the Minneapolis operation, a lot of people pricked up their ears for all these reasons, that it seems like Trump is and his people are realizing that whatever's going on there, it's not working out for us very well right now. We're going to make something of a change here. That was my, that it wasn't so much that like they picked Tom Homan. It was that they felt like they had to make a change, right? Like also you have to, I guess it's worth understanding, like this is such an insular operation that they don't really have many people to pick, right? It's not like in past where you might say, oh, man, this is really bad.

We need to bring in someone from the outside to run it. Maybe we find like a business leader or someone who's, you know, done something sort of organizationally akin to running some sort of, you know, FEMA-like operation in a city or anything with leadership or organizational skills. Normally you might do something like that, right? You deputize someone with better credentials, not this way does. but the fact that they felt like the current leadership was not doing the job right that they had to bring in home and was a real signal to me that they felt like they needed to change, that they felt like the politics were bad, that the optics were worse, that real bad shit was happening. Yeah.

And it's not just, I don't know if it's going to make any difference, but. Yeah, I mean, like kind of the funny thing that they're sort of pitching him. They're suddenly now like playing up the fact that he was also a Border Patrol official under Barack Obama, you know, that he has like, these sort of bipartisan bona fides. They're kind of pitching him as a guy who's going to go in there and maybe try to like smooth things over a little bit at this moment of like maximum hostility between the state government of Minnesota,

which I mean the stuff that they have been saying out of the state government has just been remarkable to see. Like they are they are not hiding at all how much they think that DHS and ICE and Border Patrol are like making things awful for the city. And it's not just the political leadership. It's like the police chief. of Minneapolis and the head of the commissioner of the State Bureau of Prisons, you know, Bureau of Corrections and all of these people.

And so, like, the hope is kind of that Homan will be able to kind of turn back the clock a little bit in some of this stuff. And by the way, this is not just T-Leave stuff. Like, it's not just they sent in Homan and we're all kind of like teasing out what that probably means. Let me get to that. Because the next step, which is the bigger one, I am getting to it. You know, everyone always accuses me of interrupting, but I do need to make the trains run on

time, okay, I'm that guy. It's a bad historical reference. All right. The other thing that happened was Trump puts that this bleat today. Governor Tim Walls called me with the request to work together with respect to Minnesota. It was a very good call and we actually seemed to be on a similar wavelength. I told Governor Walls that I would have Tom Homan call him and that we were looking for are any and all criminals that they have in their possession. The governor very respectfully understood that. There's a lot of unnecessary commas in this bleat. And I will be speaking to him in the near future. He was happy that Tom Homan was going to Minnesota and so am I. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Look, I mean, he didn't call him Tampon Tim. He didn't say nasty things about the state of Minnesota and the

fraud and Ilhan Omar and how rich he's gotten and, you know, all this stuff. This is a uncharacteristic post from Trump. And the fact that Walls called him and that they had a, what he called a, what he called a, you know, respectful conversation. That in itself was the biggest sign to me that Trump is, in fact, trying to de-escalate here. Yeah, I mean, he didn't, he hasn't stopped the Il-An-O-N-Mar. He mentioned it. He's still going after Il-Anon-O-Mar. But, yeah, no, there's been a deluge of this stuff.

There's been a lot of anonymous reporting out of the administration that they are just, like, sort of like, whoa, we really mishandled this stuff over the weekend with, you know, the Stephen Miller quotes about, you know, Alex Prattie being a domestic terrorist who was, who was, you know, trying to assassinate a law enforcement. and stuff like that. And then in the White House press briefing, just a little bit ago, Carolyn Levitt came out. This is like the sixth press briefing or something like that that some agent of the administration has done since this shooting, right?

And for the most part, they have been, you know, totally guns blazing. You know, Bovino has talked about it. Cash Patel's gotten up and talked about it. Kristy Knoem's talked about it. They've all been doing this same schick of like, you know, this guy basically deserved to get shot for one reason or another. Carolyn Levitt, now on the other side of whatever pivot has apparently happened, totally different story. She stuck very much to this was a tragedy on Saturday. We're going to investigate it. We're going to get to the bottom of it fully.

You know, President Trump feels for the parents. I feel for the parents. You know, I can't imagine. She says, like, as a mother, I can't imagine what that's like. She also is constantly throwing in the, and by the way, where you also feel for the families of people killed by illegal immigrants or whatever, obviously they're going to continue to do their stick in that way. But you really can. cannot emphasize enough, like, unless you watched it all happen over the weekend into today, like how much a switch has been flipped here in terms of the way they communicate. I mean, she refused to defend comments made by Stephen Miller and made by DHS officials. Yeah, I mean, you know, let's play it. Let's just play it because Stephen Miller was out there on the Twitters saying that Alex Prattie was an assassin and a terrorist and that, you know, and Bovino was saying, you know, he was, you know, thirsty for murder and stuff like that.

total bullshit lies, I mean, begging you to just disbelieve your own eyes. Carolyn Levitt's asked about it, and here's what she says. Mary. Thanks, Caroline. To follow on Gabe's question, Secretary Nome said Alex Pretti committed an act of domestic terrorism. Stephen Miller labeled Pretti a domestic terrorist. Does the president agree with them?

Look, as I've said, I have not heard the president characterize Mr. Pretti in that way. However, I have heard the president say he wants to let the facts and the investigation lead itself. Was he alarmed to hear his top officials referring to him? in that way, rushing to that judgment. Danny, go ahead. Thanks, Caroline. On Stephen Miller's comments, will Stephen Miller be apologizing

to the family of Alex Pretty for calling him, quotes, an assassin who tried to murder federal agents, despite the fact that, as you say, this is still under investigation? Look, again, this incident remains under investigation, and nobody here at the White House, including the President of the United States, wants to see Americans hurt or killed and losing their lives in American streets. And we mourn for the parents.

As a mother myself, of course, I cannot imagine the loss of life, especially losing one's child. And that same empathy from the president goes for the parents of angel families, parents of victims of illegal alien crime. Totally normal. Totally normal response. Should have been the day one response. Well, and yes, like, obviously it should have been the day one response. The question is, like, how do they think it can even now be the day three response, right? I mean, like, like this, all this stuff about, like, we're going to let it play out.

We're going to let the investigation play out. The investigation can't really play out. I mean, they've already prejudiced the investigation. They already went out of their way to spoliate the crime scene and to keep, you know, facts on the ground from being collected. And so, like, the idea that that now they can sort of retreat to this posture of, why can't we all just be adults about this? Why can't we all just be reasonable? You know, all we really want is, you know, to be able to work with local law enforcement about, you know, ICE, uh, detainers and things like that and to have them help us out while we're, while we're going after the worst of the worst. I mean, like you can imagine a world in which they led with this, not, not even just on Saturday, but that they led with this weeks ago before they launched this insane sort of like militarized occupation of the city of Minneapolis where they were like, look, there's a lot of fraud around here. We're going to surge operations around here, but we're going to keep cool. We're going to do, you know, we're just going to be normal, sort of like immigration enforcement officers about all this, but that's not what they wanted. That's not what Christy Noam and Don.

Donald Trump and Stephen Miller wanted. They wanted this sort of like shock and awe campaign. And it is only now that it has gone so bad and they realize that it's gone so bad that they are trying to be like, wait, wait, wait, wait, back up. Can we just like pretend this whole thing never happened? But you can't. You can't pretend the whole thing never happened. There are people dead in the streets. I mean, the only thing that Steve Miller can do at this point is he can quit. He's got quit in protest. I mean, just he should leave the White House. really how can you work for how can you work for Donald Trump when he's thrown you under the bus like that

I think Stephen Miller's got to go I don't think he's going to quit I think he's going to take his lumps yeah Jesus Christ all right the way we know that it's bad for the White House came later in the day when Greg Abbott Texas governor Hawke's can be on the border went on the Mark Davis show and if you don't know Mark Davis

Google him you're in for a treat you can follow you can look at some of the tweets but be prepared don't let your children be near the computer screen he said that the white is quote working on a game plan to recalibrate ice in that he believes that uh you know the white house is on and understands the need and the concerns that davis noted about ice's popularity ratings going down i know that they're working on a game plan uh to to make sure that they are going to let's say recalibrate and maybe work from a different direction to ensure that they get back to what they wanted to do to begin with. And that is to remove people from the country who are here illegally, who are allowed in by Joe Biden, especially those who pose the most danger and go about their job in a more structured way to make sure that they are going to be able to remove these people without causing all the kinds of problems and fighting in communities that they are experiencing right.

Now. So if you have people like Greg Abbott saying that, then you understand the severity of the problem that you haven't enhanced from a political perspective. But I'm with you, Andrew. You know, it's like they may be looking for an off-ramp or whatever. They know they might have a problem on their hands and they have to turn down the rhetoric. But once you go about doing what you've done, you can't really undo it. It's clear as day that they slandered a dead man's reputation within minutes.

First, they killed him. They didn't just slandered. Yeah, like they killed it first. Right after it killed him. then Slender's reputation all in the name of furthering this project that is terrorizing cities ripping up communities and that people frankly are just over. They're just over it. So yeah, we'll see what happens with the walkback that they try to do. Andrew, thank you, buddy.

I really appreciate it. For those who have watched us, thank you for doing that too. We've been following this story from start. We're going to follow to finish. If you have any thoughts, ideas, comments, just drop them in the comments feed. subscribe to the Bullwark, subscribe to Bullwark takes, this podcast feed, because we appreciate your support. We'll talk to you soon. Take care.