Jan. 25, 2026, 4:01 PM EST

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in recordings obtained by Axiosseems to have a bone to pick with Vice President JD Vance and sometimes, President Donald Trump.

In his remarks, which lasted about 10 minutes and were reportedly made in a private meeting with donors sometime last year, Cruz portrays himself as an economically-minded, pro-interventionist who has the president’s ear.

The Texas senator is also heard criticizing former Fox News personality, Tucker Carlson, and his relationship with the vice president. “Tucker created JD. JD is Tucker’s protégé, and they are one and the same,” Cruz told donors.

“[Waltz] supported being vigorous against Iran and bombing Iran — and Tucker and JD took Mike out,” Cruz said.

Cruz also said he has been trying to get the White House to accept a trade agreement with India, but claimed White House economic adviser Peter Navarro, Vance and “sometimes” Trump, are resistant.

“Trump was in a bad mood,” Cruz said. “I’ve been in conversations where he was very happy. This was not one of them.”

In a statement about the recordings, a spokesperson for Cruz said he is “the president’s greatest ally in the Senate and battles every day in the trenches to advance his agenda. Those battles include fights over staffers who try to enter the administration despite disagreeing with the president and seeking to undermine his foreign policy” and that “these attempts at sowing division are pathetic and getting boring.”

In an email responding to MS NOW’s request for comment on Cruz’s reported statements, the White House did not address Cruz’s statements.

Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter and producer for MS NOW. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.

Jan. 25, 2026, 3:02 PM EST

Alex Pretti was shot to death on the sidewalk of a street in Minneapolis after he didn’t leave when federal agents demanded he leave. Renee Good was shot to death in her car on a street in Minneapolis because she tried to leave when federal agents demanded she not.

Advocates of President Donald Trump’s administration will cite this disobedience as a central factor in Pretti and Good’s deaths. Each has been assigned a contrived danger, as well, to reinforce the urgent need for their killings: Pretti had a gun (that he doesn’t appear to have drawn) and Good had her car (that she doesn’t appear to have used as a weapon).

But their central offense, among those eager to champion Trump’s politics and policies, was their failure to be pliant. They were at odds with the state and, well, sometimes that’s punishable by death.

It has been posited that the eagerness with which Trump and his allies have defended Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents against charges of excessive force, and the alacrity with which they assign blame to the victims of those shootings, demonstrates hypocrisy, given their collective willingness to absolve — to beatify! — the rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. They, too, defied state authority and, in many cases, far more aggressively. But they are hailed as heroes by the current administration.

But this isn’t hypocrisy at all. It’s consistent. If you object to or impede their politics, they will hurt you. That is the consistency and it is why off-duty police were in the mob on Jan. 6 and why Trump supporters defend ICE today. It’s not the badge that matters. It’s the red cap.

The most jarring element of the response to Pretti’s death and to Good’s death is the speed with which the administration has disparaged the victims rather than the perpetrators. Each of them was also immediately asserted to have been a premeditated, violent actor. A terrorist. When each, instead, was at the scene of their unwitting deaths because they were part of and supportive of their community.

It is stunning, though not surprising, to see the president of the United States and sworn federal officials impugn dead citizens so callously. It’s utterly immoral, if not deranged. What flows through their veins is partisanship, and what dominates their thoughts is knocking their opponents and critics back on their heels. Perhaps there are flutters of recognition that this is not how human beings behave, much less political leaders in a democracy. But if those flames flicker into existence, they are quickly snuffed.

And for what! This is the question that continues to baffle me more than any other. Why has the Department of Homeland Security dispatched vans and SUVs filled with masked men to Minneapolis? Most immediately, it seems, it’s because a bad-faith “investigation” from a right-wing media personality made Minnesota a focus of the right’s collective anger. So the president pointed at Minnesota and his shock troops marched.

Their mission has been described in a number of ways, which means that (as with so much else in Trump’s world) the effect was decided before the cause. Maybe it’s about combatting the fraud alleged by the media personality, even though prosecutors had been investigating and securing convictions for social services fraud in Minnesota for years. Or maybe it’s just about uprooting immigrants.

This is the government’s most common explanation. Trump and his aides have repeatedly insisted that the expansive, guerrilla-style raids being conducted by federal agents in Minnesota have been effective at removing the “worst of the worst” criminal immigrants from the area, something it insists that the state’s Democratic leaders had refused to do. (The state disagrees.)

At a White House press conference on Jan. 20, Trump held up images of 40 individuals who he claimed had been detained by federal agents in Minnesota. A DHS website titled, “ARRESTED: WORST OF THE WORST,” — identifies just under 500 such people in the state. Some of them (as was the case with Trump’s visual aids) seem less like “the worst of the worst” than like “people with any criminal record at all.” Does having a DUI make you one of the nation’s worst criminals? If you weren’t born here, I guess so.

Even by DHS’ count, though, the government isn’t only targeting “the worst of the worst.” On Jan. 14, the agency put out a press release claiming that they’d arrested 2,500 of the “worst of the worst,” meaning that the website, even with the drunk drivers, is a couple thousand short in its tally. Nationally, of course, ICE has accelerated its detention of people with no criminal records at all. One analysis estimates that 92 out of every 100 people added to ICE detention last year faced no criminal charges and had no past convictions. Besides, violent crime in Minnesota was already on the decline before DHS and ICE showed up (also mirroring national trends).

So the feds rolled up some people with criminal records or maybe pending charges. In doing so, they spread chaos and confusion around the city, shipped a kindergartener off to Texas and sent a baby to the hospital.

In doing so, they killed two residents of Minneapolis, their dying bodies laying at the side of the road.

What’s the right ratio here, Mr. President? How many citizens being shot to death is worth this campaign of fear and its sporadic deportations?

It seems as though the answer is clear by now: As many as can be killed with his base still believing that they were violent opponents of the president’s politics. As long as that belief is sustained, the killings can continue because it means that his supporters’ confidence and trust in him is sustained, too. And that, more even than purifying the populaceis what matters to Trump.

The White House and DHS frequently validate their work by pointing to the killers they’re taking out of the country, outsiders who’d killed Americans. It would be a more effective argument if they weren’t defending the outsiders they brought into Minneapolis who did the same thing.

Philip Bump is a data journalist and MS NOW contributor.

Jan. 25, 2026, 2:28 PM EST

The National Rifle Association criticized a U.S. assistant attorney’s rush to judgment in the killing of Alex Pretti by Border Patrol officers in Minneapolis on Saturday.

Pretti, a 37-year old U.S. citizen and ICU nurse, had a handgun on his person before his encounter with several immigration officers. But in videos reviewed by several news outlets, Pretti did not appear to reach for his weapon before agents disarmed him and shot him on the ground.

Carrying a handgun in public is legal with a permit in Minnesota, and Pretti was a lawful gun owner – a fact the NRA has seemingly taken into consideration.

The NRA on Saturday refuted a comment made by Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, who posted to X: “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you.”

The gun rights advocacy group, in a quote tweet on Xcalled Essayli’s remarks “dangerous and wrong,” adding, “responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation, not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens.”

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement on Saturday that “an individual approached U.S. Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun.” Homeland Security Sec. Kristi Noem said at a press conference that the officer who killed Pretti feared for his life and “fired defensive shots.”

Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter and producer for MS NOW. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.