The Trump admin’s ‘F* Around and Find Out’ ethos was never a joke — and Minnesota paid the price

Years of Trump-era bravado turned civilian policing into ideological combat, writes Holly Baxter. Now MAGA is discovering what happens when FAFO meets constitutional rights

Remember when American politics prized decency and restraint? Me neither. But I do remember when street executions were just a little bit more taboo.

Call me a domestic terrorist, but I just can’t get behind the whole “killing people at protests” thing.

Unfortunately for The Donald, it looks like most of America can’t get behind it, either. Approval of President Trump’s on immigration has fallen to a record low.

Yes, it all sounded nice to his base — and even to some fence sitters — when the get-tough rhetoric was being shouted semi-coherently from a podium at a rally before the election. It was still passable when we were kidnapping autocrats from Venezuela, because who likes those guys anyway? But now, the vast majority of Americans say Trump and ICE — not to mention their ground chiefs, Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino — have gone too far.

Of course, the president’s main response was to call the polling fake and to post on his socials about how he was going to make it a criminal offense. But around Congress, Republicans whose seats are coming up in the November midterms are not that happy. White House operators are also, reportedly, more than a little panicked. It seems that, after all the stickers on the Subarus and the pick-up trucks with the shiny merch, it is the Trump administration that has actually f*** around and found out.

Gregory Bovino was reassigned from his role as Border Patrol “commander at large” in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of ICU nurse Alex Pretti by CBP agents in Minneapolis (AP)

It’s a lesson that autocrats have learned the hard way again and again throughout history: surround yourself with sycophants and eventually the wheels come off. Those sycophants might look different in different timelines — not all of them come with the augmented jawlines and the puffy cheeks of Mar-a-Lago face — but they bring the same issues.

So now what? Two civilians are dead, federal law enforcement is in damage-control mode, and Donald Trump’s movement is doing that rare thing it hates most: arguing with itself. All because a political project built on vibes, bravado and permanent escalation has finally collided with reality. Bovino is leaving Minneapolis, but nobody cares about Bovino. People want Kristi. They want Donald. They want to hear from ‘War Daddy’ Pete.

At the center of all of this mess is a fantasy that Trump did not invent but absolutely mainstreamed: the idea that American policing should operate on a “warrior ethos.” akin to the military.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — former Fox News host, current Trump whisperer, moral black hole — has been one of its most enthusiastic evangelists. Hegseth’s America is a place where cops are soldiers, cities (especially blue cities) are hostile territory, and anyone who doesn’t instantly comply is basically volunteering to be treated as an enemy combatant.

It sounds thrilling on cable news. It works less well when applied to actual human beings, especially the ones who hold American passports.

In Minnesota, federal agents were primed to interpret noncompliance as threat, threat (or even fear) as justification and justification as immunity. Two civilians dead, one for brandishing an iPhone and the other for driving a car at about 2 mph, and all of a sudden there are a lot of shocked faces from people who have spent years insisting this is exactly how things should be done.

Calls are swirling among both Republicans and Democrats for DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to step down over immigration enforcement in Minneapolis (Getty Images)

The “warrior ethos” is very big on admiration. It loves the aesthetics of courage: the patches, the language, the constant implication that everyone involved is one bad day away from Normandy. What it is less keen on is the boring, unglamorous work of civilian policing: deescalation, uncertainty, proportionality, the radical notion that not every situation needs to end with someone on the ground.

Hegseth and his fellow travelers have spent years mocking that stuff as softness and pretending to people in the country that cities are out-of-control dystopian hellscapes where people just want to give free hugs to murderous villains.

And it was fun for many to communicate mainly through the medium of bumper stickers for the past seven years: Let’s Go Brandon! Back the Blue! I Stand For The Flag! I Kneel For The Cross! I Make Up Excuses For Fascists! FAITH! FAMILY! FREEDOM!!!!

So now, we have an enforcement culture that behaves exactly as advertised.

When you train people to expect violence, they tend to produce it. When you tell them they are under siege, they start acting like it. When you promise them political cover for “tough” decisions (how quickly we forgot about that double-tap boat strike, just another recent flirtation with international law) and they stop worrying too much about the aftermath.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has emphasized a hard-line “warrior ethos” for the military that may have seeped into US law enforcement ranks (Getty Images)

“F*** around and find out” — or FAFO as War Daddy likes to say — was always meant to be a threat, not a prophecy. It assumes a neat moral universe in which the right people do the finding out and everyone else gets to feel smug.

Minnesota has complicated that story.

The finding out, it turns out, is messy. It involves internal discipline, public scrutiny, lawsuits, and the deeply inconvenient question of whether maybe — just maybe — treating domestic law enforcement like a culture war militia was a bad idea. Perhaps most of your base actually just wanted people to stop putting pronouns in their Twitter bios, y’know?

Trump, naturally, will accept none of this. Expect deflection, grievance, and the suggestion that things would have gone fine if only everyone involved had been tougher, freer, louder, or less constrained by whatever enemy is currently trending. Accountability has never been part of the warrior ethos; it clashes with the brand.

Nevertheless, the president is now making noises about deescalation, even as he launches new attacks (verbal ones, because now we have to clarify) on Mayor Jacob Frey. It’s a retreat but not a retreat.

And it’ll all end nicely now that Trump says everything went a bit too far, surely, won’t it? Well, therein lies the rub, because institutions don’t forget as easily as voters.

A federal law enforcement apparatus trained to valorize force does not suddenly rediscover restraint because the optics have gone sour. A political movement that has spent a decade cheering escalation cannot convincingly pretend it wanted calm all along. When you ask for a $45 million military parade for your birthday, you can’t really say you never had any interest in turning your country into a battleground.

Some wheels have been set in motion. Others have fallen off. Now the whole damn clown car is starting to look like it might collide with the midterms and explode into debris that hits every single Republican in the House and the Senate this year.

The GOP warrior fantasy promised order over the f***-arounders, and it played so well in the studio. But finding out, as it turns out, is a lot less fun than the bumper sticker made it sound.

Oh, War Daddy Hegseth, whatever will we do?!