The PR Breakdown with Molly McPherson

What the Spin Reveals: Power, Fear, and Humanity After the Minneapolis ICE Shooting

• Molly McPherson • Episode 346

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When Renee Goode was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, two completely different stories emerged from the same event. One side called her a domestic terrorist who weaponized her Honda Pilot, while the other saw a mother trying to escape. As a crisis manager from the Twin Cities, I break down the competing narratives from President Trump, JD Vance, Kristi Noem, Governor Tim Walz, and Mayor Jacob Frey to reveal the five hidden cues in any crisis communication: who gets humanized first, how they treat uncertainty, what the process looks like, what they ask you to do with your anger, and what happens to people who disagree. 

This isn't just political analysis, it's a framework you can apply to workplace drama, family conflict, or any situation where someone's trying to control the narrative. You'll learn why Walz's calm messaging worked after he learned from past mistakes, how Frey's profanity-laced response was strategically brilliant, and why the administration's gaslighting playbook falls apart under scrutiny. Once you learn to spot these patterns, you can't unsee them—in politics or in your personal life.

Trigger Warning: This episode discusses a fatal police shooting and contains strong language.

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Molly McPherson:

Hey there. You all know what happened last week. Everyone heard about Renee Good, 37 years old, a mother of three poet partner. She was shot and killed by an ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, during a federal operation in a Minneapolis neighborhood. You know that news reports described her as deeply kind, rooted in faith, committed to caring for others. Many people who knew her, her family, uh shared this information. Meanwhile, federal officers raced to label her a threat or a domestic terrorist. I had recorded a live last week on my Substack. I want to encourage you to join me for these lives if you want to dive in deep to news as it's happening. But in that live, I wanted to focus less on one side or the other, but just look at what the spin reveals. There were definitely competing narratives about power and fear. And we heard phrases like self-defense and domestic terrorism. And what happened in Minneapolis shows about who gets humanized, who gets dehumanized, but also how gaslighting works. And it's not just in politics, it's everywhere. Now, many of you know, if you're a longtime listener, a story like this would be very personal to me. I'm a St. Paul, Minnesota girl, but I grew up, you know, right next to Minneapolis. My many of my friends are from Minneapolis because my high school was a Minneapolis suburb. And what's happening there is heartbreaking. But in this episode, I just want to stay in my lane. It's where I work, it's where I live, it's where my value system operates. I want to suspend ideology. But let's look at the messaging because so much can be revealed in it. When big events happen, press conferences, social media clips, competing stories, what I'm looking for is how stories are told. So I was looking at statements and press conferences from Governor Tim Walls, Mayor Jacob Fry, President Trump, J.D. Vance, the White House, Homeland Secretary Christy Gnome. And by the end of this episode, I just want you to be able to look at a crisis, political or personal, and see the patterns because they're all like me. Now, in the two competing stories, we had two competing narratives: the federal narrative. ICE is under attack by a sinister left-wing movement. There's framing about a rise in assaults on ICE agents, 32% or vehicle rammings. You know, there's framing about a rise in assaults on ICE agents in the thousands in the percents, vehicle rammings, death threats. The officer who shot Renee was portrayed as acting in self-defense. The shooting was framed as an attack on law enforcement. But we now know, because people are paying attention, that back in 2014, the ICE or U.S. Border Patrol guidance said agents shall not discharge at a moving vehicle and should not place themselves in the path of a moving vehicle. This is what happens in a crisis. People start digging. So when you look at that video, you saw Honda Pilot, and how can you not think, okay, there's a mom in that Honda pilot? But how do you label that as a domestic terrorist? President Trump was sitting with New York Times reporters at the time in the Oval Office when all this was unfolding. Really bad timing for him because he had to respond in real time. He said, I don't want to see anybody, I don't, he said, quote, I don't want to see nobody get shot. I don't want to see nobody trying to, you know, and he was quoted as saying he didn't want to see anyone get shot. He didn't want to see anyone get run over by police either. An aide brought over a laptop while he was sitting with the reporters, showing footage from KSTP, that's the ABC affiliate in Minneapolis, Twin Cities area, uh, showing an angle from the front. And from that angle, it just looked like a car racing down the street. And then it would look like, yeah, if there was someone standing in front of that car, that person would be in peril. But we've seen so many angles now. And I think universally, yes, there's going to be people who say he was in danger, but I think just rational, reasonable people, you know, free of ideology, most would say that it was incredibly unnecessary what happened. Chrissy Gnome was down in Brownsville, Texas. She was wearing that ridiculous cowboy hat with the podium in front of camouflage netting. She said Renee's actions uh were an attempt to cause bodily harm to agents. It was an act of domestic terrorism, that she weaponized her vehicle. And she also talked about how the vehicle became stuck, ensnared in snow. And if you look at the street, there was some snow on the street, but no one was ensnared in snow. JD Vance said she aimed her car at ICE officer and pressed the accelerator. This was a tragedy of her own making. This was an attack on federal law enforcement. You can't watch him and not think, okay, he's campaigning. He was framing Renee as a victim of left-wing ideology. He was also blaming journalists for gaslighting. Now it was also the journalist's fault. So we clearly see what the federal framing is. Now, if you move over to Minnesota, Governor Tim Walls just pulled out of his reelection race last Monday. Think about that timing. Think about it. The week before I had a podcast all about Tim Walls and the lack of leadership during the Somali fraud crisis. He was so busy taking the bait from President Trump that he didn't look up and just govern or show people in the state of Minnesota that he was governing. But when he opened his press conference, he opened it by naming Renee, naming her family, offering sympathies to the wife, her children, talking about the GoFundMe, thanking Minnesotans for peaceful vigils. You know, he said there's a strength in numbers and power and peace. Then mentioned ICE mobilization, calling it reckless, and has not made Minnesota safer. That's the type of messaging that speaks to constituents. He kept saying Minnesota must be a part of the investigation because, from a federal point of view, they were impeding in the investigation. Mayor Jacob Fry took a very direct moral line in press conferences, and we all saw this. He said, you know, having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly this is bullshit. This was an agent recklessly using power that resulted in someone dying to ICE, get the F out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here. That is powerful framing. And I posted social media posts talking about, you know, should you drop an F bomb in a press conference? Uh typically, no, that would be the answer. You don't want to do that. But when you are attaching deep emotion to a tragedy and something where you have moral issue with what's happening, it did fit at that moment. And Mayor Frye tempered that by publishing an op-ed in the New York Times a couple days later. And he wrote about, it was titled, I'm the mayor of Minneapolis, Trump is lying to you. And he opened with the 2007 35W Bridge Collapse and mentioned when George W. Bush showed up during that disaster as a calming figure and laid out an argument how, as a country, we don't have that anymore. We have a commander-in-chief who weaponizes and politicizes events. So going to the New York Times with a thoughtful op-ed after that fiery press conference showed that Jacob Fry has a message, he has optics, and he has emotion. And it's really what Minnesotans want to see. Now let's break down the messaging. What is crisis effective? What's base motivating? What's credibility destroying? Tim Walls, when he says, I don't have a predetermined notion, yes, I saw the video, but a thorough investigation will see what happened and come up with a fair and just conclusion, and I will accept that's crisis effective language. He acknowledged the video, acknowledged emotion without being inflammatory. He refused to prejudge. That builds trust and was also a marked difference from how he managed the Somali fraud crisis in Minnesota previously. When he talked about anger and nonviolence, he said, don't give them what they want. We're not going to win this through violence. We're going to win it through justice, through compassion, through Minnesotann-ness. That's effective. He's speaking directly to an audience. Jacob Fry, he was speaking truth to power, direct, like a person, not a politician. He says there are multiple videos, multiple perspectives. The claims that Renee was a domestic terrorist. He's calling bullshit. He's calling a part of a lie. That heightened language works there. It's crisis effective, but also base motivating. It's a strategic contrast to Governor Walls. JD Vance. He said, What you see is what you get. That's base motivating mega language. But it can also be credibility destroying. He got up there and essentially told his truth, which many people see as a lie. He's going after journalists. He's using the term radical over and over. But what are the reasonable people thinking when they're watching this? Even if they're not Democrats, they could be Republicans, they could be independents, but they could be looking at the same, what the hell is going on? And you cannot suspend either that J.D. Vance wants to be the Republican candidate. A lot of it is performative. Same with Trump. And I have to say, he was a little more reserved in his tone. From the first tweet that he sent out in the hours after it happened, it was more subdued for him. I would argue that he didn't even write the post on X, that it was written by a staffer. But Christy Gnome was being so inflammatory with her language. I think an option for them was to take it down a bit. It gives them room to pivot a bit. But Christy Gnome, her lexicon, domestic terrorism, acts of terrors, you really wonder, did anyone show Christy Gnome the video? My brain goes to is someone setting her up and not showing exactly what happened in Minneapolis. So her language could be called base motivating, it's mega-coded, but also credibility destroying. And I'm not saying just from Democrats, I'm saying it from reasonable people. She is destroying her credibility within the administration because you see the momentum working against her. The federal government is talking about Renee Good as being brainwashed and part of the radical left. That messaging may work in other areas, but when a mother like this is killed, it's tough. So a crisis management lesson here, if you look at it from a perspective of someone who does this, what I would tell clients in this situation, not federal ICE agents, but something that you have to navigate that's tricky. What comes to mind is when clients were asking me about Israel and Gaza and that situation and Palestine's. And when clients came to me to talk about Israel and Palestine, they didn't know how to message that. And when people ask me, or think about this, if you're asking yourself, how do I message on this issue? What that signals is you probably haven't thought about that issue, or you don't have a value system attached to whatever that issue is. And if you don't, that's okay. Many don't. I had a client yesterday who they didn't have a value statement at all. We had to work through one. But this is why they're important, because value statements are attached to humanity. And that is an easy default message. It's very difficult to message to politics because there's always two sides. But when you start with humanity, that's everyone. Everyone's humanity. So in this case, it begins with the victim. That's what Amy Klobuchar, the senator Amy Clobuchar, is doing speaking about the victim. Compare that to the administration. ICE is the victim, Jonathan Ross. You also want to focus on truth because you have to maintain it. You have to find it again if you've lost it, and you have to build on that. You also want to manage weaponizing anger. It's understandable if you have it in situations and you can use it. I'm thinking Jacob Fry in this case. He pinpointed his anger in a direction that worked. But across the board, anger is not going to carry you through a lot because some people are going to react to that. You don't want to weaponize anger, but you can use it if you want to show emotion. There's also the psychological layer of gaslighting. And Tim Walls quoted 1984 in a press conference. It was their final most essential command. That is Waltz's saying that the government is gaslighting. And gaslighting is always one of the most frequent elements of any manipulation campaign. They convince you that you're the problem, they convince you that you're crazy. You have to believe what you see, you have to believe what you hear. You cannot watch the video of what happened to Renee Good and say she deserved that. I don't care which party you're in. I don't think any rational person would say that she deserved that. If you hear anything else, that's gaslighting. The identity scripts, like JD Vance saying you're either a law and order patriot or you're attacking law enforcement. You need to stand with ice. That is speaking to that mega identity, but also the all lives matter identity from 2020 as well. Compare that to Jacob Bry, who wants Minneapolis to be safe and says what the government is doing is the opposite. Minnesota is messaging humanity. The government is messaging dehumanization. And that's not political, that's about messaging around humans. So the hidden cues in here for any type of crisis messaging. Who do they humanize first? In Minnesota, it was Renee Good. For the White House, it was the ICE Agent. How do they treat uncertainty? Do they look at the facts or do they decide the facts at a press conference wearing a stupid cowboy hat when they haven't seen the video? What is the process for determining what happened? Is Jonathan Ross just going to work? Christy Gnome said he was recovering at home with his family. Yet we saw the video. He was walking down the street after he shot someone in the face. And then the video that was leaked, I posted something on TikTok, and I thought that it was from the White House from what I was reading, but it looks like it was leaked from ice because someone wanted to show the ice point of view, which now makes perfect sense. In the part where Jonathan Ross, after he shoots Renee Good three times and shoots her in the face, he says eff and bitch. And again, I'm not using the expletive in here. That was kept in there for a reason. It's someone who wants to code it to that law enforcement, F and bitch, she did this to me type of audience. Maybe you might find that audience, but you're not going to find a lot of people in that rational audience. You're showing what you're doing with your anger. And a rational person would say, you took your anger in a gun and you shot a woman in the face. Then you also want to look at what happens to the people who disagree. You know, Waltz talks about protecting constitutional rights and protecting the freedom to protest, but you can't have damage, you can't have recklessness, you can't have violence in that protest. So to show empathy or under more understanding for people who disagree also is good crisis messaging. So as a crisis manager, as soon as I accept a job or work, I'm looking at the person at the center, the leader, the team. I want to know what's driving them. Is it humanity? Is it empathy? Is it really trying to get to the heart of the matter? What's the ethos? What's the intention? Sometimes I see it clearly, and then I know. Recently I turned down work because I could see what was missing there. Any messaging that speaks to people at a human level uses empathy. That's usually the right message. That's a message that gets you through. So whether you're navigating a political crisis or a personal one, the dynamics are the same. Look for who gets humanized. Look for how they treat uncertainty. Look for what they do with anger. And as always, always, trust what you see with your own eyes. That's all for this week on the podcast. I encourage you to subscribe to my Substack. You can find me substack.com at Molly McPherson. I have weekly PR breakdown lives. We are breaking down the breaking news story of the week. It's usually what everyone's talking about is in the conversation around the water cooler and the bubblers and in your text chain. I want you to join me on that chat. Sometimes I live stream it across all my platforms. Sometimes it's just on Substack. And you don't need to be a paid member to be a part of these chats. You can absolutely just hop in and follow along. All right, everyone. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.

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