Trump Is Angry Over Minneapolis — and Playing Musical Chairs to “Unf*ck It”

Inside a White House that sees Minneapolis as a line in the sand, and fears losing the war if it retreats...

Welcome back to The Red Letter.

The Trump White House is scrambling, and suddenly cautious…

In my conversation with Axios’s Marc Caputo, one theme kept coming up again and again: this is not a clean retreat from Minneapolis. It’s a slow, rhetorical withdrawal — what Caputo calls a “peace with honor” retreat.

Yes, it’s a Nixon phrase. A Vietnam phrase. And not an accidental one.

Caputo chose those words because inside the administration, this moment is being treated less like domestic law enforcement and more like war by other means. Minneapolis isn’t just a city, it’s a line in the sand. One adviser put it bluntly: they can’t afford to lose it.

“What they can’t afford to do,” Caputo said on The Tara Palmeri Show, “is ‘lose Minneapolis.’ Because if they lose Minneapolis, they believe they lose Chicago, they lose Los Angeles. It’s a domino theory.”

A domino theory, applied to American cities.

That’s why Trump won’t fully retreat. He still wants more deportations. More pressure on sanctuary policies. Anything that allows him to say he didn’t blink. Because blinking in Minneapolis, they believe, risks losing the whole board.

And Trump, the producer at heart, is desperate to change the scene before the audience fully turns.

“Yeah, he’s unfcking it,” Caputo told me. “That’s the term they use — unfcking things — because things were f*cked. That doesn’t mean everything is fine.”

The problem is that the footage of Alex Pretti’s killing by ICE agents doesn’t lie — and Trump knows it. That’s why what we’re seeing now isn’t a pullback so much as a repositioning. The blame is being shifted. The cast is being reshuffled.

Trump is furious about how badly this has gone. And when Trump gets angry, he moves people around.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was sidelined after a two-hour Oval Office meeting on Monday, one that notably did not include immigration architect Stephen Miller. (Caputo is adamant Miller isn’t going anywhere: Trump, he says, “loves Stephen Miller” and prizes his encyclopedic command of immigration law.)

Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino was yanked and sent back to California. Former Obama-era immigration official Tom Homan was parachuted in. And suddenly, Trump is placing calls to Democratic governors and mayors.

Just last week, Caputo and I talked about the Chinese finger trap the administration had created for itself on immigration: a president who never backs down and never apologizes but who is now staring at polling that shows public sentiment collapsing, especially among independents and minority voters Trump made gains with in 2024.

Caputo predicted escalation rather than retreat. But Pretti’s killing has backed them into a corner.

Now comes the blame game. Internally, there’s fixation over who used the word “massacre” to describe Pretti’s intent, when evidence shows he was trying to help two women who were being roughed up by officers.

“Noem is annoyed,” Caputo said. “She’s told people, ‘I did everything the president and Stephen Miller asked me to do — and now I’m taking the blame for all of this.’ Some of that is true. She did toe the White House line. But it’s a dicey position she’s in.”

This isn’t a reset. It’s damage control. A war-style withdrawal dressed up as strategy — while the White House tries to save face, contain fallout, and pretend it never lost control of Minneapolis in the first place.