president trump

MINNEAPOLIS — The man who sprayed an unknown substance on Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar at a town hall in Minneapolis is a convicted felon who has made online posts supportive of President Trump.

Anthony Kazmierczak, 55, was convicted of felony auto theft in 1989, has been arrested multiple times for driving under the influence, and has had numerous traffic citations, Minnesota court records show. There are also indications he has had significant financial problems, including two bankruptcy filings.

Police say Kazmierczak used a syringe to spray an unknown liquid at Omar during Tuesday’s event after she called for the abolishment of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the firing or impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem following the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by immigration enforcement officers. Officers immediately tackled and arrested Kazmierczak, who was jailed on a preliminary third-degree assault charge, police spokesperson Trevor Folke said.

Photos of the syringe, which fell when he was tackled, showed what appeared to be a light-brown liquid inside. Authorities haven’t yet publicly identified the liquid.

After the attack, there was a strong, vinegarlike smell in the room, according to an Associated Press journalist who was there. Forensic scientists were called in, but none of the roughly 100 people who were there had a noticeable physical reaction to the substance.

Omar continued speaking for about 25 minutes after Kazmierczak was ushered out, saying she wouldn’t be intimidated. While leaving, she said she felt a little flustered but wasn’t hurt, and that she was going to be screened by a medical team.

She later posted on X: “I’m ok. I’m a survivor so this small agitator isn’t going to intimidate me from doing my work. I don’t let bullies win.”

A Trump supporter

Kazmierczak hadn’t been formally charged or scheduled for an initial court appearance as of Wednesday morning. The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office has until Thursday to charge him but could seek an extension. A spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office didn’t immediately return a call seeking further information.

It isn’t clear if Kazmierczak has a lawyer who could speak on his behalf. The county’s chief public defender, Michael Berger, said the case hasn’t been assigned to his office.

In social media posts, Kazmierczak described himself as a former network engineer who lives in Minneapolis. Among other things, he made comments critical of former President Joe Biden and referred to Democrats as “angry and liars.”

“Trump wants the US is stronger and more prosperous,” Kazmierczak wrote. “Stop other countries from stealing from us. Bring back the fear that enemies back away from and gain respect that If anyone threatens ourselves or friends we will (expletive) them up.”

In another post, Kazmierczak asked, “When will descendants of slaves pay restitution to Union soldiers families for freeing them/dying for them, and not sending them back to Africa?”

Often at odds with the president

Omar, a progressive, has been a frequent target of Trump’s barbs since she joined Congress in 2019.

That year, Trump urged Omar and three other freshmen congresswomen of color known as “the squad” to “ go back ” to their countries if they wanted to criticize the U.S. Omar was the only one of the four born outside of the U.S., having immigrated to the country as a child when her family fled violence in Somalia.

Trump stepped up his criticism of Omar in recent months as he turned his focus on the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, which is home to about 84,000 people of Somali descent — nearly a third of the Somalis living in the U.S. During a Cabinet meeting in December, he referred to her as “garbage.” And he has linked the Twin Cities immigration crackdown to a series of fraud cases involving government programs in which most of the defendants have roots in the East African country.

The White House did not respond to a Tuesday message seeking comment. But, when asked about the attack Tuesday night, he told ABC News that he hadn’t watched the footage and accused her of staging the attack. “She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her,” Trump said.

Earlier Tuesday, the president criticized Omar as he spoke to a crowd in Iowa, saying his administration would only let in immigrants who “can show that they love our country.”

“They have to be proud, not like Ilhan Omar,” he said, drawing loud boos at the mention of her name.

He added: “She comes from a country that’s a disaster. So probably, it’s considered, I think — it’s not even a country.”

Lawmakers face rising threats

The attack came days after a man was arrested in Utah for allegedly punching U.S. Rep. Maxwell Frost, a Democrat from Florida, in the face during the Sundance Film Festival and saying Trump was going to deport him.

Threats against members of Congress have increased in recent years, peaking in 2021 following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol before dipping slightly only to climb again, according to the most recent figures from the U.S. Capitol Police.

Following Tuesday’s attack on Omar, U.S. Capitol Police said in a statement that the agency was “working with our federal partners to see this man faces the most serious charges possible to deter this kind of violence in our society.”

Lawmakers have discussed the impact of the threatening political climate on their ability to hold town halls and public events, with some even citing it in their decisions not to seek reelection.

Biesecker and Bargfeld write for the Associated Press. Biesecker reported from Washington. AP reporter R.J. Rico in Atlanta contributed to this report.

Drawing on decades of experience after having dealt with the beating of Rodney King, the killing of George Floyd and more, American law enforcement leaders, civil rights advocates and other legal experts have honed best practices for officers making street arrests, conducting crowd control and maintaining public safety amid mass protests.

Officers are trained to not stand in front of or reach into moving vehicles, to never pull their firearms unless it is absolutely necessary, and to use force only in proportion to a corresponding threat. They are trained to clearly identify themselves, de-escalate tensions, respect the sanctity of life and quickly render aid to anyone they wound.

When police shootings occur, leaders are trained to carefully protect evidence and immediately launch an investigation — or multiple ones — in order to assure the community that any potential wrongdoing by officers will be fairly assessed.

According to many of those same leaders and experts, it has become increasingly clear in recent days that those standards have been disregarded — if not entirely tossed aside — by the federal immigration agents swarming into American cities on the orders of President Trump and administration officials tasked with overseeing the operations.

In both small, increasingly routine ways and sudden, stunning bursts — such as the fatal shootings of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis — agents have badly breached those standards, the experts said, and without any apparent concern or investigative oversight from the administration.

Agents are entering homes without warrants, swarming moving vehicles in the street and escalating standoffs with protesters using excessive force, while department leaders and administration officials justify their actions with simple, brash rhetoric rather than careful, sophisticated investigations.

“It’s a terrible disappointment,” said former Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore. “These tactics — if you call them that — are far and away out of touch with contemporary policing standards.”

“This isn’t law enforcement, this is terror enforcement,” said Connie Rice, a longtime civil rights attorney who has worked on LAPD reforms for decades. “They’re not following any laws, any training. This is just thuggery.”

“They use excessive force against suspects and protesters, they detain and arrest people without legal cause, they violate the 1st Amendment rights of protesters and observers,” said Georgetown law professor Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor.

“These types of tactics end up hurting all of law enforcement, not just federal law enforcement, even though state and locals didn’t ask for these types of tactics, and, frankly, have been moving away from them for years out of a recognition that they undermine trust in communities and ultimately hurt their public safety mission,” said Vanita Gupta, associate attorney general under President Biden and head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under President Obama.

The White House said Trump does not “want any Americans to lose their lives in the streets,” believes what happened to Pretti was “a tragedy” and has called for an “honorable and honest investigation.” But administration officials also have defended the immigration crackdown and the federal agents involved, blaming protesters for interfering with law enforcement operations and accusing critics of endangering agents. However, many of those critics said it is the tactics that are endangering officers.

Gupta said Trump’s immigration surge “deeply strains the critical partnerships” that local, state and federal law enforcement agencies typically have with one another, and puts local leaders in an “incredibly challenging position” in their communities.

“State and local chiefs have to spend 365 days of the year building trust in their community and establishing legitimacy … and in comes this surge of federal agents who are acting out of control in their communities and creating very unsafe conditions on the ground,” Gupta said. “That is why you’re seeing more and more chiefs and former chiefs speaking out.”

Moore said the tactics are “unnecessarily exposing those agents to harm, physical harm, as well as driving an emotional response and losing legitimacy with the very public that, as an agency, they are saying they are there to protect.”

Issues on the ground

Good was fatally shot as she tried to drive away from a chaotic scene involving federal agents. The Trump administration said the officer who shot her was in danger of being run over. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, without evidence, accused Good, 37, of being a “domestic terrorist.”

Experts questioned why the group of agents swarmed Good’s vehicle, why the officer who fired positioned himself in front of it, and whether the officer was in fact in danger of being hit given Good was turning her wheel away from him. They especially questioned his later shots into the vehicle as it was passing him.

Under best practices for policing, officers are never to shoot into moving vehicles except in exigent circumstances, and are trained to avoid placing themselves in harm’s way. “You don’t put yourself in that position because you have the option to just take down the license plate number and go arrest them later if you think they’ve violated the law,” said Carol Sobel, a Los Angeles civil rights attorney who has driven police reform for decades.

Moore said he was trained in the 1980s to avoid engaging with moving vehicles, yet “40 years later, you see not just one occasion but multiple occasions of those tactics” from immigration agents.

Pretti was fatally shot after trying to protect a woman who was violently shoved to the ground by an immigration agent also spraying chemical irritant. The Trump administration said that Pretti had a gun, and that the officers had acted in self-defense. Without evidence, Noem alleged Pretti, also 37, was “attacking” agents and “brandishing” the gun, while White House advisor Stephen Miller alleged that Pretti “tried to murder federal agents.”

Experts questioned why the agents were being so aggressive with the woman Pretti was trying to help, and why they reacted so violently — with a burst of gunfire — when he was surrounded by agents, on the ground and already disarmed.

Moore said that the officer who shoved the woman appeared to be using “brute force rather than efforts to create de-escalation,” and that spraying irritants is never suitable for dealing with “passive resistance,” which appeared to be what the woman and Pretti were involved in.

In both shootings, experts also questioned why the agents were wearing masks and failed to render aid, and lamented the immediate rush to judgment by Trump administration officials.

Gupta said the immigration agents’ tactics were “out of line” with local, state and federal policing standards and “offensive to all of that work that has been done” to establish those standards.

Bernard Parks, another former chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, said that videos from the two incidents and other recent immigration operations make it clear the agents are “totally untrained” for the operation, which he called “poorly designed, poorly trained,” with a “total lack of common sense and decency.”

Ed Obayashi, an expert in police use of force, said that although the agents’ actions in the two shootings are under investigation, it is “obvious” that Trump administration officials have not followed best practices for conducting those inquiries.

“The scenes have been contaminated, I haven’t seen any evidence or any what you would call standard investigative protocols, like freezing the scene, witness checks, canvassing the neighborhood, supervisors responding to try to determine what happened,” he said.

The path forward

Last week, California joined other Democrat-led states in challenging the crackdown in Minneapolis in court, arguing that Noem’s department “has set in motion an extraordinary campaign of recklessness and disregard for norms of constitutional policing and the sanctity of life.”

On Sunday, the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police, which has played a central role in establishing modern policing standards in the U.S., said it believes that “effective public safety depends on comprehensive training, investigative integrity, adherence to the rule of law, and strong coordination among federal, state, and local partners,” and called on the White House to convene those partners for “policy-level discussions aimed at identifying a constructive path forward.”

On Tuesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom and California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta reminded California law enforcement that they have the right to investigate federal agents for violating state law.

Gupta said the Trump administration failing to investigate fatal shootings by federal agents while “boxing out” local and state officials suggests “impunity” for the agents and “puts the country in a very dangerous place” — and state investigators must allowed in to investigate.

Butler said that the situation would definitely be improved if agents started adhering to modern policing standards, but that problems will persist as long as Trump continues to demand that immigration agents arrest thousands of people per day.

“There’s just no kind and gentle way,” he said, “to take thousands of people off the streets every day.”

World-renowned composer Philip Glass abruptly canceled June’s world premiere of Symphony No. 15 “Lincoln” at the Kennedy Center, saying its message does not align with the vision for the venue under the Trump administration.

“Symphony No. 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the Symphony. Therefore, I feel an obligation to withdraw this Symphony premiere from the Kennedy Center under its current leadership,” Glass wrote Tuesday in a letter to the board that was shared with The Times.

“We have no place for politics in the arts, and those calling for boycotts based on politics are making the wrong decision,” Roma Daravi, vice president of media relations at the Kennedy Center, said in response.

President Trump has served as board chair since early last year when he fired the existing board and appointed former ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, as president. The newly installed board promptly installed Trump in his current position. The president’s pursuit of a deeply conservative agenda for the arts unleashed unprecedented chaos at the nation’s premiere performing arts center, resulting in massive upheaval and wave after wave of prominent artist cancellations.

The news that Glass was calling off his appearance also caught off guard the National Symphony Orchestra. The NSO commissioned the symphony in 2022 for the Kennedy Center’s 50th anniversary, and Glass was late to deliver. The symphony was scheduled to be performed with the NSO on June 12 and 13.

“We have great admiration for Philip Glass and were surprised to learn about his decision at the same time as the press,” Jean Davidson, the orchestra’s executive director, said in an email.

The news comes amid a growing chorus of high-profile cancellations that have occurred since the center’s board voted last month to rename the venue the Trump-Kennedy Center, and quickly added the president’s name above that of Kennedy’s on the exterior of the building.

Jazz drummer Chuck Redd pulled out of a Christmas Eve show and the jazz group the Cookers canceled two New Year’s Eve performances. Banjo player Béla Fleck also stepped away from concerts with the NSO and “Wicked” composer Stephen Schwartz said he no longer plans to host a May 15 gala at the center.

The arts world was rocked by the news earlier this month that the Washington National Opera’s board approved a resolution to leave the venue it has occupied since 1971. Kennedy Center leadership, including Grenell, quickly shot back that it was the board that asked the WNO to depart.

“We have spent millions of dollars to support the Washington Opera’s exclusivity and yet they were still millions of dollars in the hole — and getting worse,” Grenell wrote on social media.

Most recently, the center’s website announced that soprano Renée Fleming would no longer perform in two scheduled shows. “A scheduling conflict” was the reason cited, but speculation about the opera star’s departure swirled as the center’s artistic losses mounted amid widely reported plummeting ticket sales.

During the recent upheaval, arts watchers have begun wondering about the future of the NSO, which, along with the recently departed WNO, represents the twin pillars of artistic programming at the center.

According to Daravi, the NSO isn’t pulling out of the venue.

“The relationship is strong, and we have a wonderful season here with Maestro [Gianandrea Noseda] in his 10th year leading the NSO,” Daravi wrote in an email last week, noting the “record-breaking success at the recent Gala benefiting the NSO which launched the new season. The event raised $3.45 million, marking an all-time fundraising record for the organization.”

On Monday Trump sought to boost his financial management of the venue in a Truth Social post that read, “People don’t realize that the Trump Kennedy Center suffered massive deficits for many years and, like everything else, I merely came in to save it, and, if possible, make it far better that ever before!”

The center’s calendar is looking increasingly sclerotic as big names continue to defect, with the NSO providing much-needed padding as it moves on in the face of unending change.

Hey, Greenland — feeling a little low after President Trump’s ongoing attempts to buy or otherwise acquire the land under your feet? Neil Young can fix that framework!

Just keep “Rockin’ in the Free World.” For free. Forever.

The 80-year-old “hippie at heart” on Tuesday granted “our friends in Greenland” a year of free access to his music catalog, hoping that its contents “ease some of the unwarranted stress and threats you are experiencing from our unpopular and hopefully temporary government.”

(Of course, all U.S. administrations, even Trump’s, are effectively temporary, given the whole “elections every four years” thing. That should ease some stress right there.)

“It is my sincere wish for you to be able to enjoy all of my music in your beautiful Greenland home, in its highest quality,” Young wrote on his blog. “This is an offer of Peace and Love. All the music i have made during the last 62 years is yours to hear.” It’s unclear whether he’s giving away the middle-tier “Rust” subscription, which is just a penny under $45 a year, or the top-notch “Patron” subscription, which adds unspecified extras and a promise of priority treatment for $99.99 annually. The basic level subscription, at $24.99 a year, doesn’t provide the “highest quality” sound or the “music films” his message promises.

Greenlanders who take him up on his offer can renew for free annually as long as they stay put on the island. Young’s team will need cellphone numbers with the Greenland country code: 299.

Young said he hoped other “organizations” would follow in his footsteps.

He does have a “Heart of Gold,” after all.

DES MOINES, Iowa — President Trump is headed to Iowa on Tuesday as part of the White House’s midterm year pivot toward affordability, even as his administration remains mired in the fallout in Minneapolis over a second fatal shooting by federal immigration officers this month.

While in Iowa, the Republican president will make a stop at a local business and then deliver a speech on affordability, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. The remarks will be at the Horizon Events Center in Clive, a suburb of Des Moines.

The trip is expected to also highlight energy policy, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles said last week. It’s part of the White House’s strategy to have Trump travel out of Washington once a week ahead of the midterm elections to focus on affordability issues facing everyday Americans — an effort that keeps getting diverted by crisis.

The latest comes as the Trump administration is grappling with the weekend shooting death of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse killed by federal agents in the neighboring state of Minnesota. Pretti had participated in protests following the Jan. 7 killing of Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer. Even as some top administration officials moved quickly to malign Pretti, the White House said Monday that Trump was waiting until an investigation into the shooting was complete.

Trump calls Pretti killing ‘sad situation’

As Trump left the White House on Tuesday to head to Iowa, he was repeatedly questioned by reporters about Pretti’s killing. Trump disputed language used by his own deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who on social media described Pretti as an “assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.” Vice President JD Vance shared the post.

Trump, when asked Tuesday if he believed Pretti was an assassin, said, “No.”

When asked if he thought Pretti’s killing was justified, Trump called it “a very sad situation” and said a “big investigation” was underway.

“I’m going to be watching over it, and I want a very honorable and honest investigation. I have to see it myself,” he said.

He also said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was quick to cast Pretti as a violent instigator, would not be resigning.

Republicans want to switch the subject to affordability

Trump was last in Iowa ahead of the July 4 holiday to kick off the United States’ upcoming 250th anniversary, which morphed largely into a celebration of his major spending and tax cut package hours after Congress had approved it.

Republicans are hoping that Trump’s visit to the state on Tuesday draws focus back to that tax bill, which will be a key part of their pitch as they ask voters to keep them in power in November.

“I invited President Trump back to Iowa to highlight the real progress we’ve made: delivering tax relief for working families, securing the border, and growing our economy,” Rep. Zach Nunn, R-Iowa, said in a statement in advance of his trip. “Now we’ve got to keep that momentum going and pass my affordable housing bill, deliver for Iowa’s energy producers, and bring down costs for working families.”

Trump’s affordability tour has taken him to Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina as the White House tries to marshal the president’s political power to appeal to voters in key swing states.

But Trump’s penchant for going off-script has sometimes taken the focus off cost-of-living issues and his administration’s plans for how to combat it. In Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, Trump insisted that inflation was no longer a problem and that Democrats were using the term affordability as a “hoax” to hurt him. At that event, Trump also griped that immigrants arriving to the U.S. from “filthy” countries got more attention than his pledges to fight inflation.

Competitive races in Iowa

Although it was a swing state just a little more than a decade ago, Iowa in recent years has been reliably Republican in national and statewide elections. Trump won Iowa by 13 percentage points in 2024 against Democrat Kamala Harris.

Still, two of Iowa’s four congressional districts have been among the most competitive in the country and are expected to be again in this year’s midterm elections. Trump already has endorsed Republican Reps. Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks. Democrats, who landed three of Iowa’s four House seats in the 2018 midterm elections during Trump’s first term, see a prime opportunity to unseat Iowa incumbents.

This election will be the first since 1968 with open seats for both governor and U.S. senator at the top of the ticket after Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds and Republican U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst opted out of reelection bids. The political shake-ups have rippled throughout the state, with Republican Reps. Randy Feenstra and Ashley Hinson seeking new offices for governor and for U.S. senator, respectively.

Democrats hope Rob Sand, the lone Democrat in statewide office who is running for governor, will make the entire state more competitive with his appeal to moderate and conservative voters and his $13 million in cash on hand.

Kim and Fingerhut write for the Associated Press. Kim reported from Washington. AP writer Michelle L. Price in Washington contributed to this report.

BRUSSELS — NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte insisted on Monday that Europe is incapable of defending itself without U.S. military support and would have to more than double current military spending targets to be able to do so.

“If anyone thinks here … that the European Union or Europe as a whole can defend itself without the U.S., keep on dreaming. You can’t,” Rutte told EU lawmakers in Brussels. Europe and the United States “need each other,” he said.

Tensions are festering within NATO over President Trump’s renewed threats in recent weeks to annex Greenland, which is a semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark.

Trump also said that he was slapping new tariffs on Greenland’s European backers, but later dropped his threats after a “framework” for a deal over the mineral-rich island was reached, with Rutte’s help. Few details of the agreement have emerged.

The 32-nation military organization is bound together by a mutual defense clause, Article 5 of NATO’s founding Washington treaty, which commits every country to come to the defense of an ally whose territory is under threat.

At NATO’s summit in The Hague in July, European allies — with the exception of Spain — plus Canada agreed to Trump’s demand that they invest the same percentage of their economic output on defense as the United States within a decade.

They pledged to spend 3.5% of gross domestic product on core defense, and a further 1.5% on security-related infrastructure – a total of 5% of GDP – by 2035.

“If you really want to go it alone,” Rutte said, “forget that you can ever get there with 5%. It will be 10%. You have to build up your own nuclear capability. That costs billions and billions of euros.”

France has led calls for Europe to build its “strategic autonomy,” and support for its stance has grown since the Trump administration warned last year that its security priorities lie elsewhere and that the Europeans would have to fend for themselves.

Rutte told the lawmakers that without the United States, Europe “would lose the ultimate guarantor of our freedom, which is the U.S. nuclear umbrella. So, hey, good luck!”