Seeing the reality of the tragedy in Minnesota

Influenced by perception bias, the president and his supporters miss the truth

Jan 10, 2026

Was it a hawk or a tree branch? What we see often depends upon what we imagine to be true. (Photo by Hunter Masters on Unsplash)

There was a red-tailed hawk, still as death, high in a decaying tree on the edge of our property last week, clearly poised to swoop down and seize an unsuspecting rodent in the field. Or so I thought. No, I was sure. I saw the breeze ruffle its feathers. It seemed to barely breathe.

Finally I laid hands on binoculars and peered up into the woods. And there was no hawk. Had it flown off as I had briefly looked away? Or was the ragged treetop I saw through the binoculars, its bark edges where the hawk’s tail had been, all that was ever there? Could the hawk have been just a manifestation of my enthusiasm for living among wild creatures?

Psychologists are familiar with the phenomenon of perception bias — our tendency to see the world as we imagine it or wish it to be, rather than as an accurate portrayal of reality. Good journalists are always alert to perception bias because, as the singing bard Paul Simon wrote in “The Boxer” in 1969, “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

If you hear only what you want to hear, you can’t be a truth-teller, which is the fundamental task of the journalist, as it ought to be of the public servant, too. Certainty is typically an enemy of truth. Truth more often emerges in nuance.

The ability to find and realize what’s true matters hugely because a society is held together by shared understandings, and by facts that are recognized as such by its citizens. So we need leaders with the emotional capacity to recognize their own biases and respond to challenges with thoughtful flexibility, the better to coax us away from seeing everything in stark terms that will further divide us. If they don’t always tell us everything straight up, at least those who aspire to lead in a democracy ought not to intentionally mislead us. They shouldn’t be motivating our perceptions toward falsehood.

Tragically, we are long past any realistic expectation that Donald Trump, ever the eager merchant of mendacity, is capable of such emotional or intellectual maturity. It would take a psychologist to tell us for sure, but I suspect Trump can no longer perceive what’s true. He certainly doesn’t care to try in order to help heal his hurting nation.

That’s why we are all endangered by the killing in Minneapolis this week of Renée Macklin Good, a 37-year-old mother of three — shot three times in her car by a federal agent on assignment from the White House. This is a moment that demands an understanding of both our limited capacity for 360-degree perception and our need for empathy. That’s not at all what we’re getting from the president and those who reflexively support him. Instead, we’re being encouraged to retreat into our biases, at the risk of widening divisions in our society that might never heal.

Yet there is in this tragedy a sliver of hope that we are nearing change. You can almost imagine it, based on what we’ve seen before.

This is far from the first time that an American has died in a clash between federal troops demanding order and demonstrators pleading for conscience. For some of us old enough to remember, the homicide in Minneapolis is too reminiscent of an event seared into the national consciousness during the Vietnam War, which I recall from the spring of my last weeks in high school: the killing of four students at Kent State University in Ohio by National Guard troops.

The parallels to today are clear. Like the Minneapolis homicide this week, the Kent State tragedy emerged after federal troops were dispatched to tamp down demonstrations. Like the America of 2026, the nation in 1970 was divided over the reason for the troops’ presence in the heartland: Were they dispatched to maintain order, or were they really a provocation to draw political support for increasingly unpopular federal policies?

There was arguably more cause for a law enforcement presence in Ohio 56 years ago than there was in Minnesota now. There had been massive protests against the Vietnam War at Kent State University the year before and on other campus earlier in the spring, leading to some property damage and criminal convictions. On the day that President Richard Nixon announced that American troops had invaded Cambodia, the Kent State ROTC building had been torched.1

The president responded the next day by labeling demonstrators on campuses as “bums.” Jim Rhodes, a Nixon ally who was the governor of Ohio, claimed that protesting students were succumbing to agitation from outsiders, whom he called, in words that sound so familiar today, “the worst type of people that we harbor in America.” When he heard of an impending demonstration at Kent State, Rhodes sent infantry and cavalry troops of the state’s National Guard to the campus.

On the first Monday afternoon in May, as the ROTC building still smoldered, some 2,000 people, mostly students, gathered on the grassy commons and a nearby hill. As jeering students tossed some rocks and ignored bullhorn orders to disperse, the 77 guardsmen advanced, initially firing tear gas cannisters. Then, inexplicably and seemingly without a direct order to do so, some of the soldiers knelt, aimed and opened fire with M1 rifles and shotguns.

The shooting lasted only 13 seconds, with 67 rounds fired. Four students fell dead, and nine more were wounded. They were standing at an average distance of about a football field away from the troops.

By the next day, photographs of the incident had covered the world. The most memorable image, which won a Pulitzer Prize for a photojournalism student, was of a 14-year-old girl screaming over the body of a dead friend. And the growing antiwar movement was suddenly energized.

A Gallup Poll a day after the shootings revealed that 58 percent of Americans blamed the students for what happened. Five days later, though, 100,000 people demonstrated in Washington, prompting President Richard Nixon to evacuate to Camp David. The president’s counsel at the time, Charles Colson, later told an interviewer that troops in the nation’s capital city revealed “a nation at war with itself.” The White House insisted any harm, including the killings, were the protestors’ fault.

A week after the Kent State killings, 11 people were bayonetted by National Guard troops at the University of New Mexico; at Jackson State University in Mississippi, two students were shot dead and 12 wounded by police. The Nixon administration, unmoved, claiming the protestors were pawns of communist organizers. Aides to the president pushed the idea of gathering information on anti-war movement leaders through illegal means, a plan that was stopped at the insistence of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

Yet as the protests continued, massive crowds began to assemble. A student strike involving millions of students emerged, shutting down 450 campuses. A common sentiment was expressed by a banner at New York University: “They Can’t Kill Us All.” And the image of young people being killed by troops on American campuses began to have an impact on the public consciousness, as the ongoing military effort in Southeast Asia grew increasingly unpopular.

Feeling rising public unease, Nixon named a blue-ribbon commission led by Bill Scranton, a former Pennsylvania governor, to study the campus violence. If he expected full exoneration of federal responsibility, he was disappointed: In its report four months after the Kent State shootings, it concluded, “Even if the guardsmen faced danger, it was not a danger that called for lethal force.”

None of the guardsmen who fired weapons faced homicide charges, and though eight were accused of federal civil rights violations, all were acquitted. A civil action against the State of Ohio brought by Kent State victims and their families led to a settlement totaling $675,000, and a statement of regret from the state that included the observation that “another method would have resolved the confrontation.”

Some historians and many contemporary observers of what took place at Kent State believe that it was a turning point in public opinion about the nation’s war effort. Protests over the preceding four years or so had been drawing increasing numbers of demonstrators, notably including the so-called Moratorium to End the War in the fall of 1969. But none of that had seemed to move public opinion as much as the killing of young people on a midwestern campus.

Though Nixon was never convinced that he didn’t still have the upper hand with what he called “the silent majority,” the pressure to end the war grew intense. Finally, in January of 1973, the United States signed a peace accord with North Vietnam. By that time, 58,000 Americans had died in the war, and 154,000 had been wounded. The total loss of lives on all sides likely exceeded 1.3 million. But the war’s social and political impact was incalculable, undermining trust in government and breeding some of the cynicism that we face yet today.

What’s often called the rhyming of history — one generation’s mistakes reflected in those of the next — rings especially loudly when it falls on deaf ears in officialdom. In the blunders he daily forces upon the nation, Donald Trump, the oldest person ever inaugurated as president, seems to recognize none of his predecessors’ mistakes, even those he personally witnessed.

The killing in Minnesota, like those at Kent State when Trump was 23 years old, occurred when the chance of violence was exacerbated by the presence of troops with weapons locked and loaded. Those involved in conscientious protest of government policies were denigrated by both presidents — “bums,” in Nixon’s words, “animals” and “a foreign enemy,” according to Trump — with no sense among the presidents’ backers that the protestors might be right.

There is no indication that Trump is at all concerned by the reaction to the killing of Renée Good. Like Nixon’s response to Kent State, Trump seems undeterred for now in his policies; in fact, he quickly ordered more troops into Minneapolis.

There are limits to the parallels between Kent State and Minneapolis. For one thing, the chance of reaching public consensus on any issue now are more elusive than they were during the Vietnam war. Today’s fragmented media environment, with extreme voices on digital platforms and billionaire-owned networks valuing audience over accuracy, diminishes the reach of the thoughtful journalism that might help grow a consensus among Americans. There will be no independent review like the Scranton commission, and there is no independence from the White House’s political agenda at today’s FBI, which J. Edgar Hoover, for all his faults, insisted upon.

Indeed, Trump seems to not even be able to see that he may misperceive the shooting itself. During a remarkable conversation with four reporters for The New York Times, Trump showed a video of the shooting, and insisted Good was at fault because of the “vicious situation” in which “she ran him over.” In fact, the officer was not run over — the video shows him walking around after the incident — and a frame-by-frame analysis shows that Good was turning away from the officer, in the lawful direction on a one-way street, as she was shot.2

Yet there may be a shred of hope in that notion of the rhyming sense of history. Despite every challenge, the same inexorable tide of public opinion that eventually ended the Vietnam war is rising against Trumpism now; the president’s approval rating is below 40 percent in reputable polls. It is hard to imagine that Americans won’t be moved further by the horror of the killing of a woman who was by all accounts a devoted mom — who was, like Trump’s most vociferous supporters, a white Christian — and by a 6-year-old boy left motherless in Minneapolis.

Or am I imagining a red-tailed hawk? Plenty of Americans won’t respond yet to this tragedy; perhaps we’re not as far along in the battle against Trumpism as the anti-war forces were when Kent State shook the nation. Thousands of Americans died in Vietnam between that turbulent spring of 1970 and the withdrawal of the last U.S. troops from Southeast Asia almost three years later.

So we need to pay close attention to those who continue to line up behind a dim-eyed president, and encourage them to consider the moral violation that this killing is. The fact of a president who denies reality doesn’t excuse the rest of us from a responsibility to enlighten those who follow him — or, for that matter, to combat our own motivated perception. What we perceive to be true may not, in fact, fully capture reality, and the lack of self-awareness and critical thinking capacity in others doesn’t mean we don’t need to practice those skills.

Led by a president divorced from the reality of this time, with so many of his supporters motivated by either perception bias or cynical pursuit of political power, we have experienced a scene of horror, at least in the eyes of so many of us who count ourselves good Americans. This, though, we know to be true: Eventually, reality forces itself upon even the most ardent of its detractors.

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