It was morning, and the wide Las Vegas Strip was empty. Neon signs glittered quietly as Matthew Livelsberger cruised a silver Tesla Cybertruck down the palm tree-lined boulevard. It was around 8 a.m. on Jan. 1, 2025.
In a convenience store parking lot, he backed into a spot and got out. A square-jawed 37-year-old, he wore jeans and a yellow T-shirt under a brown leather jacket. A security camera filmed him popping the tailgate and calmly dousing piles of fireworks and birdshot in the bed with a fuel can. Then he slid back into the driver’s seat and pulled away.
A line of fuel drips traced his path past the Sphere and the Palazzo and the Wynn, down Fashion Show Drive and up the gentle slope into the Trump International Hotel’s valet parking area, where chandeliers hung like upside-down wedding cakes. The Cybertruck stopped in front of the building’s gleaming gold and glass doors.
At 8:39 a.m., it exploded. A fireball rocketed upward from its bed, a force so powerful that the 6,800-pound vehicle’s tires jumped off the ground. Hunks of shrapnel flew, the fireworks crackled and spiraled and ricocheted, then came a series of bellowing booms and pops. Flames shot out through the truck, and when the smoke finally cleared, it was a blackened husk. Livelsberger’s body sat in the front seat, dead from a single gunshot. Six other people were injured.
Ryan Martinez, a jeweler, was driving to work when it happened. He dialed 911 from across the street as his black BMW was pelted with bits of metal.
“Someone just attacked Trump Tower with a monster amount of fireworks,” Martinez told the dispatcher. In the background, a loud BANG echoed. “Oh, my God, my heart is beating. … It’s an attack for sure,” he said. “Oh, my God. Ma’am, this is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen — and I work on the Strip.”
In the following hours and days, investigators learned that Livelsberger was a decorated active-duty Green Beret, part of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces, which specialize in guerilla warfare. In writings found on his phone, he called on troops to forcibly remove Democrats from office and rally around Donald Trump, who had just been elected president for a second term in an electoral sweep that placed Republicans in control of the federal government. “This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wake-up call,” Livelsberger wrote. “Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence.”
The explosion in Nevada started a bloody year. While studies showed that violent crime rates fell nationwide in 2025, experts found that political violence — assassinations, threats and aggressive immigration enforcement — sharply increased. According to studies by Princeton University and the Brennan Center for Justice, threats, stalking and physical attacks on state and local lawmakers rose. Meanwhile, mass shootings killed 405 people across the country.
While studies showed that violent crime rates went down nationwide in 2025, experts found political violence sharply increased.
Trump never spoke publicly about the bombing — a rare silence for a voluble president. But in his first year back in the White House, Trump released National Security Presidential Memorandum/NSPM-7, which identified anti-fascism, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism and anti-Christianity as domestic terror priorities, along with anyone who feels “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality.” The Department of Justice had a list of people it considered domestic terrorists, and FBI Director Kash Patel issued a proclamation vowing to investigate left-wing activists.
Meanwhile, the bomb at Trump Hotel, which was motivated by right-wing ideology, faded from the news, drowned out by America’s usual violence. People debated whether it should be considered terrorism. But I kept wondering: If that wasn’t terrorism, what is?
THE TESLA SUPERCHARGER IN KINGMAN, Arizona, was a row of white obelisks next to a Carl’s Jr. on a busy corner of Route 66.
I’d been driving for close to 1,100 miles, retracing part of the journey Livelsberger took to Las Vegas from Colorado Springs, along with the routes that other violent men had taken. For the last decade, I’ve crisscrossed the Western U.S. to report on domestic extremism. On occasion, that means writing about men who went on long drives before doing something terrible — shooting someone, blowing up a building.
I write about the fringier, more violent and extreme parts of the West. Even so, I was having a hard time grappling with how bloody and horrible 2025 was. I thought if I retraced the steps of people who’d committed acts of violence, maybe I could get a little closer to understanding their motivation.
Of course, there’s not much to see in a Carl’s Jr. parking lot: a family in the back of their minivan with the sliding door open, eating lunch; Tesla drivers backed up to the chargers, plugged in and scrolling on phones. Traffic passed; birds chirped in a nearby tree. The eye of the desert sun never blinked.
After the bombing, Tesla provided authorities with a map of all the places Livelsberger charged the Cybertruck — a strange path that wound from Colorado Springs south through New Mexico, then west across Arizona, through Kingman, past Lake Mead to the Las Vegas Strip.
The fact that Livelsberger stopped in Kingman caught my attention. Twice before, I’d written about veterans who detonated bombs on American soil; both had spent some time beforehand in Kingman.
In July 2016, Glenn Franklin Jones — who served 11 years in the Army and National Guard in Colorado before becoming a nurse — built bombs in a Kingman RV park, intending to blow up a Bureau of Land Management office. Instead, he drove 300 miles to a former colleague’s house in Panaca, Nevada, and blew himself to pieces, flattening the house and blanketing the 1,000-person town in shrapnel. Somehow no one else was hurt.
Timothy McVeigh also lived in Kingman. The Gulf War veteran logged thousands of miles driving the country, but the highway always seemed to pull him back to Kingman.
“(McVeigh’s) not from here, but he spent more time here than anywhere else in the two years preceding the bombing. So how much of his hatred was sown here or grew here? We don’t know.”
In March 1993, he visited Waco, Texas, amid a broiling 51-day standoff between federal agents and the Branch Davidians, an apocalyptic religious group the government suspected of child abuse and possessing automatic weapons. Prolonged confrontations like this have a way of drawing onlookers. McVeigh came to sell gun rights bumper stickers off the hood of his car.
That standoff ended on April 19, 1993. Bullets flew, the compound burned, 82 Branch Davidians and four agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives died. The White House admitted the government’s handling of the situation was riddled with mistakes.
Two years later, on April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City as payback for Waco, killing 168 people. Afterward, federal agents and journalists descended on Kingman.
Dave Hawkins, a longtime Kingman radio and newspaper reporter, was all over the story. When I visited his houselast fall, he muted a football game on TV and showed me to his kitchen table, which was covered in boxes filled with notepads and cassette tapes of his interviews after the bombing — even a letter from McVeigh. From one box, Hawkins drew out a gray T-shirt that read “I Survived the FBI Invasion of Kingman, Arizona.” A local woman sold them to raise funds for the bombing victims.
He said Kingmanites were both horrified by the bombing and irritated at the presence of so many federal agents. “They pushed back, because the town was being misrepresented as this little gritty shithole where extremism lived and breathed and grew,” Hawkins said. “(McVeigh’s) not from here, but he spent more time here than anywhere else in the two years preceding the bombing. So how much of his hatred was sown here or grew here? We don’t know.”
It’s something I’ve often wondered — how someone’s roots in a particular place formed their specific brand of extremism.
“McVeigh was against the government and the status quo,” Hawkins told me. “We have a community that is pro-Trump and against a lot of the status quo of government. … But nobody is gonna give Tim McVeigh a medal or a Chamber of Commerce Citizen of the Year.”
THE STANDOFF AT WACO FASCINATED Timothy McVeigh — and me.
I was 11. Raised in the middle-class suburbs west of Portland, Oregon, I had taken to reading the comics in the local newspaper, The Oregonian, at the kitchen counter after school over a bowl of Kraft macaroni and cheese. I still remember the April 20, 1993, issue: the burning building on the front page, the massive headline: “An apocalypse at Waco.” A graphic broke down the final hours of the standoff: how government tanks ripped holes in the compound, the clouds of tear gas, the fires.
The Associated Press called David Koresh, the Branch Davidian leader, “A prophet with a pistol. A lamb with an attitude.” He had multiple wives, some my age — 11- and 12-year-old girls. Reporters wrote that the compound’s children “expected doomsday to occur.”
I didn’t understand, but I was fascinated. Who was the good guy? The government? The prophet with the pistol?
Now, years later, I’ve started to see all my work on homegrown violence as a long examination of Americanism. My first taste was Waco — what it illuminated about freedom and its boundaries, reverence for God and guns, how the government plays both hero and villain.
I continue to be fascinated by how wide America’s ideological umbrella is, how willing we are to give shelter to hate-filled ideas.
Of course, hateful ideas aren’t illegal, but terrorism is. And yet, the United States’ definition of domestic terrorism is about as stable as a waterbed in an earthquake.
The FBI defines domestic terrorism as dangerous criminal activities within the country that “intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of the government by intimidation or coercion,” and “affect the conduct of the government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.” The Oklahoma City bombing is widely considered the nation’s deadliest act of domestic terrorism, yet McVeigh wasn’t tried for terrorism — only murder. Domestic terrorism in itself is not a criminal charge, and proving someone is a domestic terrorist in court is extraordinarily difficult.
I continue to be fascinated by how wide America’s ideological umbrella is, how willing we are to give shelter to hate-filled ideas.
The Department of Homeland Security defines domestic terrorism slightly differently, as an attempt “to disrupt our way of life and weaken our country” that causes a “disruption of normal life.” But that word “normal” is subjective. Is it normal for children to go to schools and do active shooter drills? Is it normal to scope out the exits in movie theaters or shopping malls or nightclubs or churches, in case someone starts shooting? Yet perpetrators of mass shootings are rarely considered domestic terrorists by the justice system.
By that metric, the government decides what officially terrifies us. I’ve formed my own working definition of terrorism to try to account for all the fear that comes with violence — the way life stops, and happiness and comfort are put on hold in the face of terror. Which happens all the time: Since I started writing this piece, the U.S. has seen 139 mass shootings. None were deemed terrorism.
Turns out no one can agree on how to define terrorism. In 2023, Alex P. Schmid, a distinguished fellow with the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, authored a report on this. “Terrorism remains a contested concept as also exemplified in the well-known saying: ‘One man’s terrorist is the other man’s freedom fighter,’” he wrote.
Defining terrorism, Schmid argued, means questioning who is allowed to be violent, and why. In the late 1700s, during the Reign of Terror, the revolutionary government of France led 17,000 people to the guillotine to suppress the aristocrats conspiring with foreign governments to restore the old regime, a monarchy. So chopping people’s heads off was both terrorism and a government project.
With the invention of dynamite came bombs, and bombs allowed anyone to be a terrorist. “Terrorism was considered a means of avenging a popular wrong, inspiring fear in the enemy, and also calling attention to the evil against which the act of terror was directed,” Russian American anarchist Alexander Berkman said in 1929.
Terrorists threaten or enact violence, and that violence is then publicized to a wider audience — the real target. “Violence aims at behavior modification by coercion,” Schmid said. “Propaganda aims at the same by persuasion. Terrorism can be seen as a combination of the two.”
IN 2001, I LIVED IN A RED-SHAG CARPETED basement in a ramshackle house in Spokane, Washington, a few blocks from Gonzaga University, where I attended college. On the morning of Sept. 11, the phone rang, rousing me and my four roommates, and together we watched airplanes hit the World Trade Center on TV. That night we held candles in a vigil at the center of campus.
The Spokesman-Review, the local newspaper, became a chronicle of fear — closed schools, cancelled football games, grounded flights. Life had stopped; you felt that you could be attacked anywhere, anytime.
For weeks on TV, the planes exploded, buildings falling in an endless loop, a constant reminder.
That week, The Spokesman featured a full-page American flag “suitable for display at home or work.”
“Our flag carries with it the idea of America,” read the back.
We clipped it with scissors and taped it in our front window.
When the violence we experience comes from elsewhere, we pause. When the violence is ours, we act like it didn’t happen.
Everyone promised to be more vigilant, as if citizens were now responsible for sniffing out hijackers. America embraced xenophobic hyper-nationalist propaganda. Tragedy opened the door to bigotry, and people invited it in, as if to say, “How can we think about equality at a time like this?” It was as if people believed a state of collective fear could shield us from further violence.
More than two decades later, in 2026, the bullet-riddled bodies of children are regularly carried out of schools and churches. Sandy Hook Promise estimates that 390,000 students in the country have experienced gun violence in school since 1999.
But life has never stopped in response — not like it did on 9/11. I’ve never seen a clear explanation for why all this subsequent carnage is not terrorism.
When the violence we experience comes from elsewhere, we pause. When the violence is ours, we act like it didn’t happen. We continue to wave the flag. We are lucky to be so free.
JUST HOURS BEFORE MATTHEW LIVELSBERGER’S Cybertruck bombing on Jan. 1, an Army veteran drove a truck into a crowd in New Orleans, killing 15. Inside his truck, the FBI said it found a flag associated with ISIS. The government classifies ISIS as a foreign terrorist organization, so this was considered terrorism.
The violence of New Year’s Day seemed best explained as just the latest bloodshed in a country where political violence was growing more common.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump survived two assassination attempts; in one, a sniper’s bullet drew blood from his ear. In December 2024, Brian Thompson, CEO of the insurance company UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed in New York City. After his accused shooter, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, was arrested, support for Mangione spread quickly on social media. A judge slapped down efforts by prosecutors to try him as a terrorist, yet both the Trump assassination attempts and Thompson’s killing were cited as terrorism in an executive order.
In May, a car bomb ripped a hole in the brick wall of a Palm Springs, California, fertility clinic. The bomber, who died, was an anti-natalist advocating for human extinction — terrorism, the FBI decided.
In June, Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were murdered in their home, and Rep. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were shot in theirs. Both lawmakers were pro-choice Democrats; the accused assailant, known for his anti-abortion views, has not faced terrorism charges.
On Sept. 10, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot while speaking to a crowd at Utah Valley University, in Orem, Utah. Charging documents said his accused killer, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, was outraged by Kirk’s political viewpoints. While White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller falsely claimed Robinson had connections to terrorist networks, Robinson faces no terrorism charges.
That same month, however, the Trump administration called protesters outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office in Portland “terrorists.” News footage showed a man in a chicken suit and a cadre of protesters dancing in inflatable frog costumes.
“There is this growing cultural element of the Internet where consumption of hyper-violent content, regardless of where it comes from or what type, has become very normative.”
Meanwhile, Matt Kriner, the executive director of the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism (ICDE), said his organization — which monitors terrorist and extremist threats — was searching for what, if any, qualities bombers, mass shooters and assassins shared that could explain their violence. ICDE found two: “The belief that there’s no political solution,” Kriner said. “If the system … does not carry forward progress or options to exercise their grievance, they will find another way to exercise it.”
And: “There is this growing cultural element of the Internet where consumption of hyper-violent content, regardless of where it comes from or what type, has become very normative,” Kriner said.
Did those qualities apply to Livelsberger? A senior sergeant with 19 years in uniform, he enlisted in the Army in 2006, and as a Green Beret deployed twice to Afghanistan, and to Ukraine, Georgia, Tajikistan and Congo.
“With his training and experience, he could have made an unbelievably devastating explosive if he wanted to,” retired undercover FBI agent Greg Rogerstold me. Rogers, now an adjunct professor at Utah Valley University, helped prosecute McVeigh and formerly worked as an assistant district attorney in Texas. For someone who’d spent nearly two decades in Special Forces and knew about bombs, Livelsberger’s device was peculiar: The Cybertruck was packed with fireworks, racing fuel and birdshot that he’d purchased somewhere on his trip.
“I think, had he lived, he’d have been charged under federal domestic terrorism statutes,” Rogers said.
The bombing was clearly political. “We honestly thought that the use of the Cybertruck was something that was sending a message,” Kriner said. “It was meant to capture the people that he was trying to speak to, not as an intimidation or threat against those that he was trying to speak out against.”
“I think, had he lived, he’d have been charged under federal domestic terrorism statutes.”
In a manifesto found on his burned iPhone, Livelsberger wrote: “Fellow Servicemembers, Veterans, and all Americans, TIME TO WAKE UP!” He said to “move on DC starting now,” to lock down highways and hold government buildings “until the purge is complete.” The country needed to undergo a “hard reset.”
“We are the United States of America, the best country people to ever exist! But right now we are terminally ill and headed toward collapse,” he wrote in a longer manifesto. “We are crumbling because of a lack of self respect, morales (sic), and respect for others. Greed and gluttony has consumed us. The top 1% decided long ago they weren’t going to bring everyone else with them. You are cattle to them.”
He expressed concern over the class system, income inequality and Americans’ obsession with being online, and overflowed with Trumpian talking points: Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives were “a cancer,” Americans had fallen from “family values,” and “masculinity is good and men must be leaders.”
“I needed to cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.” He said people should “rally around Trump, Musk, Kennedy, and ride this wave to the highest hegemony for all Americans! We are second to no one.”
Livelsberger claimed this was not a terrorist attack, but it fit the exact definition laid out in 1974 by another Green Beret, Brian Michael Jenkins, who made a career out of studying terrorism. “Terrorism is aimed at the people watching, not at the actual victims,” Jenkins wrote in a paper. “Terrorism is theatre.”
Before I left Kingman, I decided to check out where Glenn Jones lived — the man who’d built a bomb in a trailer, then exploded a house in Nevada.
What I saw surprised me: The Zuni Village RV Park was so much smaller than I pictured, trailers packed into a dusty lot on a busy road, like sardines in a can.
That closeness implied so much recklessness. Maybe it shouldn’t have shocked me — that if Jones’ bomb had exploded as he built it, it could have killed so many people.
Jones, McVeigh, now Livelsberger: Writing about them, I’ve thought about how each bomb was an infliction by a man who had decided to make his life a weapon. Why be a gun when you can be a bomb? Something that ripples out a blast wave of pain, that tears through bodies and buildings, through everyone and everything, and just keeps going.
IN THE AFTERMATH OF VIOLENCE, MEDIA outlets race to figure out who was responsible, whether that person was previously a good person and, if so, what happened to change them. Sometimes there’s a backstory: online radicalization, hateful views, an obsession with violence. But more often than not, reporters find breadcrumbs too fine to hold — a story that falls through the fingers.
Livelsberger spent most of his life in the military. None of the people I interviewed who served with him would allow me to use their name, not even to say on record how much they loved Livelsberger. One called him “an absolutely wonderful human being.” Another said he was “exceptional” in every aspect: as a soldier, a leader, a teammate, a friend. They told stories of goodwill: Livelsberger collecting toys for Afghan children, helping an interpreter and his family get American citizenship, furnishing their home, driving them to appointments.
So what accounts for his last act? People could only speculate. One person sent me screenshots from Instagram showing that Livelsberger posted racist comments about Black Lives Matter and police shootings of Black Americans. Military friends said PTSD alone didn’t explain what Livelsberger did; they cited “operator syndrome” — a term University of Hawai‘i professor and clinical psychologist Chris Frueh defines as “a constellation of interrelated conditions common to military special operators” caused by brain injuries and the grueling demands of the job. “Wish he’d been able to get help,” Frueh told me after reading the manifestos. “It’s just sad.”
“Terrorism is aimed at the people watching, not at the actual victims. Terrorism is theatre.”
Kristofer Goldsmith, an Iraq war veteran who is now president of Task Force Butler Institute, which researches extremism in the military, offered yet another view: When someone enlists for a specific reason, and those reasons shift, they’re destabilized, reminded their body is simply a tool in a game played by others.
“I signed my contract, joined the Army, went to Iraq, and just before getting the order was told, ‘Oh, actually, stand down, don’t look for weapons of mass destruction. But you’re still going to war anyway,’” he said. “That was my moment that made me vulnerable to things like manipulation and adopting conspiracy theories.”
Still, Goldsmith was clear about Livelsberger’s bombing: “That was fucking terrorism,” he said. “It was just coming from a man who was white and aligned with the president instead of ISIS.”
My long study of extremism makes me see the West differently than other people, overlaying the region with a map of terrible attractions — people, places, tragic events. On my recent road trip, I sped across the I-15 overpass in Bunkerville, Nevada, where, in 2014, armed militiamen shut down the freeway so they could aim sniper rifles at the federal agents trying to impound cattle in the gravelly wash below. I passed the exit that would take me toward the two flagpoles commemorating that standoff, which many people see as a victory: “We The,” reads one. “People,” reads another. I didn’t stop; I’d been there years ago.
I spent the night in St. George, Utah, where I went by Charlie Kirk’s accused assassin’s apartment on my way to get dinner and drove down the quiet street where he grew up. Outside his family’s home, a group of boys threw a football in the street in the pink early evening light. They waved as I passed.
In Colorado Springs, where Livelsberger had visited his wife and daughter just before driving to Las Vegas, my confusion about him only grew. The writings he left behind showed his grief — his sense that the country was hopelessly lost, sliding into some immoral abyss, and that the way to fix it was to adopt his positions on family, gender roles and race.
At a gas station where he stopped, the clerk handed me my receipt and said, “Have a blessed day!” Bumper stickers in midday traffic had crosses, the names of local churches. I passed by Focus on the Family — the conservative Christian juggernaut with notoriously anti-LGBTQ views.
In Colorado Springs, I saw the world Livelsberger wanted. How had he not seen that it already existed?
Eleven months after the explosion, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department released a 78-page after-action report on the bombing. It did not address whether it was terrorism, and a spokesperson declined to respond to my multiple requests for information.
In the report, Jennifer Davis, Livelsberger’s wife, told investigators he’d had an affair. She confronted him about it, and he left. Days later, she texted him, asking about a bill for a hotel in Denver. “She said that he had been testing her to see whether she was watching him,” the report read. Livelsberger then locked her out of their bank account.
In Colorado Springs, I saw the world Livelsberger wanted. How had he not seen that it already existed?
When I read about that, I started to wonder if misogyny played more of a role in what happened than I’d been willing to admit. Misogyny is, quite frankly, an occupational hazard of this work on extremism — so common that, perversely, it can become difficult to see.
In 2025, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a global extremism expert, published Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism. “The most common — and least discussed — feature of mass shooters and violent terrorists is their manhood,” she wrote.
“It is something that we desperately need to look at and get to the bottom of,” Lydia Bates, a senior program manager at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, told me one day over Zoom.
Bates and her colleague Rachael Fugardi, a senior research analyst, study male supremacist violence, which the SPLC defines as the “belief that cisgender men are naturally, biologically and genetically superior” to all other genders. In Livelsberger’s writings, they saw hints of this: his talk of “family values” and belief that “masculinity is good and men must be leaders.”
“I didn’t see any headlines that talked about that,” Bates said.
Fugardi said that male supremacist beliefs are often overlooked in media coverage. “There is a degree to which misogyny is not considered extremism,” Fugardi said. “It is just like a normal baseline. … Sometimes that blinds us, maybe, to seeing the radicalization pathways.”
In fact, many of the ideas detailed in Livelsberger’s manifestos echoed what many American men already thought.
Last year, Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice, a research organization dedicated to gender equality, released a report called State of American Men 2025. Of the 2,400 men surveyed, half expressed a belief that for one group to succeed, another has to lose, while more than 60% defined feminism as “favoring women over men.”
The study was like a codebreaker for Livelsberger’s writings: It found that 52% of American men said they felt safer under Trump, and 55% “support Trump’s effort to dismantle DEI.”
“We have to humanize and understand what makes people vulnerable to these ideologies,” Bates said, because “male supremacist facets in other extremist ideologies” were being harnessed to recruit veterans. “They’re playing to that power, control, toxic masculinity, violence as protection.”
On the road, every time I saw a Cybertruck, it felt like an omen.
Through Colorado and Utah, Nevada and Arizona, I wound through curving passes where signs warned of falling rocks. One might break away at any moment, the result of a gradual, inevitable process. And when that happens, it could smash a window, crush a car.
“They’re playing to that power, control, toxic masculinity, violence as protection.”
As I drove, I thought about how Livelsberger and his fellow extremists fell away, too, smashing themselves through society, part of a gradual process of violence and victimization. It only seems inevitable because we let such violence continue. It’s a way to keep power over everyone.
Defining terrorism is an exertion of power, too: It tells people who the heroes and villains are. And in early 2026, as a large-scale deportation campaign sent masked Border Patrol and ICE agents flooding into cities across the country, that was on full display.
One day in January, in Minneapolis, a 37-year-old poet named Renée Good dropped her child off at school. She and her wife were driving home when they saw ICE agents.
Video footage showed Good’s car at an awkward angle, blocking a street where other people had assembled to blow whistles and warn about the agents. She tried to navigate around the agents, but one of them grabbed her doorhandle, told her to get out. Good drove away — and the agent, Jonathan Ross, shot her.
“Fucking bitch,” Ross said as Good’s car crashed.
Within hours, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stood at a lectern, stumbling through a script. Good, Noem said, made “an attempt to kill or cause bodily harm to agents — an act of domestic terrorism.”
Protests swelled nationwide.
Two weeks later, a Minneapolis ICU nurse filming federal agents with a smartphone was executed by ICE agents.
Resisting ICE in any way was “the definition of domestic terrorism,” Noem said afterward.
One bright afternoon in February, a “family-friendly” march took place in Portland, where I still live. It was a cross section of the city: elderly folks waving signs, children holding hands with parents, people with dogs on leashes. They all marched to the ICE building in the South Waterfront district, and within minutes were bathed in so much tear gas that roads in the area had to be shut down. People scattered, babies cried; everyone struggled to breathe. In one video, a little girl in a pink butterfly sweatshirt rubbed her eyes as street medics in gas masks tried to help her.
It was, by then, becoming easy to recognize the cycle of violence and propaganda. Even as Trump and Noem (who was ousted from her position in March) tried to define terrorism for us, the many Americans who took to the streets made one thing clear: We can define violence and terrorism just fine on our own.
Adam Maida is an independent graphic designer, illustrator and former art director for The Atlantic based in Toronto. His award-winning work spans editorial, film and book publishing industries, among others.
We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the April 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The War Within.”
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