The Minnesota Crisis

At first I hesitated to write something about the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis this weekend, because it felt trite to tie his death to the corporate compliance world. What lesson were we supposed to unpack here? That federal agents shooting a disarmed and subdued man shows the importance of proper employee training? Analysis like that insults Pretti’s humanity.

Instead, my mind drifted to lessons of leadership, governance, and corporate culture. Imagine the United States as a business, President Trump and his inner circle as senior management, and the American people as the workforce. How would we grade the performance of our leaders trying to address Pretti’s death? 

To my thinking, no serious ethics and compliance professional would say that Trump or any of his henchmen have done anything other than fail. They’ve been terrible, some of them outright evil. If an executive behaved this way in a private company, we’d all be rooting for the board to fire that CEO immediately. Even if we’re too skittish to say so on LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever, we all know it.

Start with the way that Trump, vice president J.D. Vance, attorney general Pam Bondi, homeland security secretary Kristi Noem, and all the other inner circle all immediately lurched into attacking Pretti even before his body was cold. They branded him a left-wing lunatic, someone poised to whip out his pistol and start massacring federal agents. Of course the federal agents were right to shoot him, they said; Pretti f—ked around and found out.

Obviously no leader should make a statement like that when he or she doesn’t know the facts, or really ever. That’s Leadership 101, and why every corporate compliance and legal officer always tells management that in the midst of a crisis, you never rush to judgment.

Except, everyone already knows that this management team does rush to judgment. They can’t help themselves. So I almost overlook Team Trump’s first instinct to cast Pretti as the villain. Like, what else were they going to do? Pause? Reflect?

What struck me more was the way Team Trump has stuck with their story even amid the clear, incontrovertible evidence that no, Pretti was not the villain here. In one video after another, anyone with two eyes can plainly see that (a) he never brandished his gun; (b) ICE agents had taken his gun from him before he was shot; and (c) agents had subdued and secured Pretti on the ground. Then they shot him 10 times, at least three of those times in the back. 

And still, Team Trump insists with its nonsense that Pretti was an imminent threat. They maintain the lie even when they know it’s a lie, and when they know everyone else knows it’s a lie.

That’s the part I just can’t fathom. If you want to rush out and say something stupid before knowing the facts — well, that’s stupid, but everyone does it from time to time, including CEOs. But to insist on a fiction even when everyone else sees that fiction for what it is; to willingly incinerate your credibility and make yourself look like an idiot and then still expect people to follow you — you’re kidding, right?

This was the moment the Trump Administration relinquished its ability to lead. True, the Administration still has the ability to force, by the barrel of a gun or the relentlessness of a lawsuit or the menace of a mob whipped up online. Trump and his minions have done all that before, and they’ll do it all again. 

But none of that is the same as the ability to lead: to inspire people to follow you and the objective you want to achieve. Trump and his people have lost that credibility not just because they lie, but because they continue to lie even when they know everyone else knows it’s a lie.

Leadership requires trust. It requires faith. As far as I can see, Trump and his minions no longer care whether anyone has trust or faith in their statements: do what we say, or we’ll shoot you or sue you or persecute you until you do. That’s just force. It’s frightening, but it’s not impressive. It’s weak.

Corporations Start to Speak

I did see that on Sunday afternoon, the CEOs of more than 60 Minnesota companies (3M, Best Buy, Cargill, Medtronic, Target, and many others) published an open letter calling for “an immediate de-escalation of tensions and for state, local and federal officials to work together to find real solutions.” 

That statement is better than nothing, but it’s still pretty weak sauce. Notice that the CEOs didn’t identify the Trump Administration by name, when really the Administration is the only one who can do the de-escalating because they’re the ones escalating in the first place. They documented the loss of life (“Recent challenges facing our state have created widespread disruption and tragic loss of life”) but never expressly condemned it, or offered condolences to the families of Pretti and Renee Good.

And to the best of my knowledge, none of these 60-ish corporations participated in the general strike in Minneapolis on Friday, while hundreds of smaller businesses did. It’s a reminder that the bigger an organization you are, the harder it is to respond quickly and clearly to a moral crisis.  

OK, fine; big businesses need more time to calibrate and coordinate their responses to this crisis. We should also give them some leeway since the Trump Administration is descending into delusions and hysteria in ways normal people just can’t comprehend. 

My question is what these executives (and others) will do next time, since the next provocation is never far away when we talk about Trump. Their employees are all watching. If these leaders don’t demonstrate a commitment to the ethics and moral values they claim to hold so dear, they’ll be just as discredited and invalidated as the Trump Administration will now forever be.