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Published On: Sat, Jan 10th, 2026

Susan Glasser: Minnesota Shooting “In Some Ways What They Wanted,” Trump’s Goal Is To Incite Conflict

“New Yorker” writer Susan Glasser said on “Washington Week” that President Donald Trump wanted the fatal ICE-related shooting in Minneapolis to occur to incite “conflict inside the country.”

JEFFREY GOLDBERG, ‘THE ATLANTIC’ EDITOR, ‘WASHINGTON WEEK’ HOST: Susan, I want to switch to ICE and the domestic issues. There’s no sign that the opposition in cities like Minneapolis, Portland, and so on is doing anything but making Trump and J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller double down on aggressive enforcement. Where is this heading? SUSAN GLASSER, NEW YORKER: Yes. I think that’s an important point to make, Jeff, is that it seems that this is, in some ways what they wanted, or a political goal of theirs, was to incite, you know, conflict inside the country division, rancor, escalation. There are, of course, many mayors, not just the mayor of Minneapolis, who believe that the presence in their cities of this enhanced ICE presence, these immigration crackdowns is designed, in fact, to provoke civil conflict. You do hear Miller and Trump muttering all the time about the possibility of invoking something like the Insurrection Act, especially as courts rule against them in terms of troops. And you have this horrific incident in Minneapolis, which would be terrible under any circumstance. But what I’ve noticed, and we’ve all seen it obviously, is the specific, calculated decision in particular by Vice President Vance to inflame the situation. He has spent the last several days constantly on social media vilifying the woman who was killed after dropping off her child at school in the morning rather than doing what any other politician would have done in our lifetime, simply saying, this is a tragedy, it should be investigated. Vance has made it a strategy to escalate this and to pit Americans against each other. And, yes, maybe he’s trying to distract from the fact that Donald Trump is not the America First isolationist that J.D. Vance thought he was, or that he campaigned on. I don’t know. But it’s very divisive and very painful to us .

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