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The L.A. Fires Expose a Web of Governments, Weak by Design

Published

5 months ago

January 19, 2025

The L.A. Fires Expose a Web of Governments, Weak by Design

When two hijacked jetliners struck the World Trade Center towers in New York City on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani became the face of a city struggling with tragedy, a ubiquitous presence projecting authority, assurance and control. The reputation he forged that day would be tarnished with time, but it became a model for mayors facing crises across the country.

As Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles confronts a city dealing with devastating fires, her performance has raised questions, even among her supporters, about whether she can become the dominant executive leading a city through a crisis that New Yorkers saw more than 23 years ago.

Some of those concerns reflect her relative lack of executive experience — she is a former member of Congress and the California assembly, where she served in the powerful role of speaker. And some of those concerns have to do with the fallout from her absence from the city when the fires broke out.

But the question of who is in charge — of who is playing the role in Los Angeles that Mr. Giuliani did in New York, to use one example — is also testimony to the diffusion and, at times, dysfunction that make up the core DNA of the governance of the greater Los Angeles area. That muddled authority is a sharp, and by design deliberate, contrast with New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and other cities that are dominated by powerful, high-profile mayors.

The city of Los Angeles, with a population of 3.8 million, is one of 88 different cities that make up the county of Los Angeles. That county, with a population of 9.6 million spread across 4,751 square miles stretching inland from the Pacific Ocean, is controlled by a five-person board of supervisors, each one representing 1.9 million people. Each of those supervisors rivals the mayor of Los Angeles in clout as they oversee their own fiefdoms in the nation’s most populous county, even if they are relatively unknown by constituents.

Within those vast borders, there is a Los Angeles Police Department and a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, as well as an additional 45 police departments protecting, to name a few, Santa Monica, Long Beach, Inglewood and Pasadena. There are dozens of municipal fire departments, including one that serves the city and another that serves the county.

One of the two major fires that devastated this region — the Eaton fire — is not even in the city of Los Angeles; it is in an unincorporated section of Los Angeles County. The response to the Eaton fire was led by the county fire department; the city fire department was at the forefront in fighting the Palisades fire.

All of this is a recipe, analysts said, for rivalry among elected officials and confusion among voters, and a challenge for even the most accomplished elected official trying to grab the mantle of leadership amid what Gray Davis, a former California governor, called “the dispersed and discombobulated nature of our government.”

“As an executive most of my life — controller, lieutenant governor, governor — there’s a time when you need clear accountability, someone who will give orders and accept responsibility whether things work or not,” said Mr. Davis, who served as governor from 1999 to 2003. “The public here seems not to want that on a day-to-day basis. But when there is an emergency, we need that. And we don’t have that system.”

When New Orleans was overrun by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, resulting in devastating damage and hundreds of deaths, the mayor, C. Ray Nagin, stepped forward to lead his city through the crisis, and to raise his national profile. (Mr. Nagin’s reputation, like Mr. Giuliani’s, also faded with time.) At a recent press briefing about the fires in Los Angeles, eight city and county officials lined up to speak. Ms. Bass was just one part of the lineup, talking about the Palisades fire, but so was Kathryn Barger, the increasingly high-profile member of the county board of supervisors whose district includes the Eaton fire.

“What you have in a city like New York is a fundamentally mayor-oriented system where, even in quiet times, everything flows to the mayor,” said Raphael J. Sonenshein, a longtime expert on Los Angeles politics and government and the executive director of the Haynes Foundation, a Los Angeles civic research organization. “Here it’s a little more of an art to exercise mayoral leadership. The mayor might have strong opinions, but to get problems solved, you have to figure out how to get these governance agencies to work together. It’s very hard to get things done.”

None of this is accidental.

The web of overlapping governments is the product of a reformist system of governance that has evolved over the years, designed to constrain the authority of cities, counties and the people who lead them. Many of the people who settled here over the past century came from the Midwest, and they carry a strong distrust of the powerful mayors and political machines found in cities like Philadelphia, New York and Chicago.

The mayor of Los Angeles does not control the school system, as is the case in some other large cities. Public health falls mostly under the jurisdiction of Los Angeles County, forcing the mayor and supervisors to work together on challenges such as homelessness. In the city, there is a police commission that makes the final decisions on hiring and firing police chiefs; Ms. Bass needs the commission to ratify her choice of who should head the department.

The stakes here are high. The fires are diminishing, but rebuilding could end up being as challenging as battling the fires, testing the resources and agility of this teeming catalog of elected officials.

Eric M. Garcetti, a former mayor, said all these government agencies — notwithstanding any history of rivalry — had appeared to work in tandem as the fires raged. “But for the rebuild, it’ll be absolutely critical for us to act like we’re one city and not a collection of 88 villages,” he said in an interview from India, where he is now the U.S. ambassador.

These structural tensions have long been a source of frustration for Los Angeles mayors. In interviews, two of them — Mr. Garcetti and Antonio Villaraigosa — said they would support creating a dominant government representing the region, to replace the network of overlapping municipal governments. Mr. Villaraigosa said he supported, for example, remaking Los Angeles along the lines of San Francisco, which is both a county and a city. They both argued the issue had become more urgent with the kind of natural disasters that have come with climate change.

“I don’t think that’s going happen in my lifetime, but it would certainly make things more coherent,” Mr. Garcetti said. For now, he said, mayors have to fall back on the power of persuasion. “Informal power is so critical,” he said. “It is so critical to put together coalitions.”

Mr. Villaraigosa said that, in raising concerns about the structural challenges Los Angeles faces, he was not criticizing Ms. Bass. “I don’t want to join that,” he said. “But when you have all agencies involved — 25 people speaking — it diffuses the leadership model. You have two different bureaucracies trying to work together. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.”

By contrast, unconstrained by jurisdictions, Gov. Gavin Newsom has been an ever-present figure over these past nearly two weeks, walking through smoky ruins as he has talked with firefighters and people who have lost their homes. He expanded a special legislative session to address the Los Angeles wildfires and signed executive orders dealing with response and recovery efforts.

Ms. Bass has been criticized for being out of the country when the fires erupted — she was in Ghana in West Africa to attend the inauguration of its new president. Upon her return, in a widely circulated clip, Ms. Bass stood silently as a reporter pressed her on why she left amid warnings of dangerous fire weather.

Since her return, she has issued her own executive orders to expedite rebuilding, and she has named a longtime civic leader, Steve Soboroff, to head recovery efforts. But she has also repeatedly defended her performance, saying that she and leaders across the region are working “in lock step” to address the crisis.

“We are actively fighting this fire,” she said at a news conference on the second day of the crisis, adding: “So what we are seeing is the result of eight months of negligible rain and winds that have not been seen in L.A. in at least 14 years. And we have to resist any — any — effort to pull us apart.”

The mayor’s office did not immediately return a request for comment on Saturday.

Even before the fire, there was movement to repair the system. In November, county voters endorsed the biggest change in its government in a century — including the establishment of a new person to lead the county of Los Angeles, an elected county executive who will be chosen in the 2028 election.

“They will be the most powerful elected official in the United States,” said Fernando Guerra, the head of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. “They will represent 10 million people. They will have a lot of power. Most important, they are going to steal the thunder and the pulpit from the mayor of Los Angeles. It’s going to be as centralized as New York is now.”

It’s difficult to say what role a county executive might have played in directing the government’s response to the fires, a duty typically overseen by the fire departments themselves. But officials said that what the region needed, in addition to the fire and police officials who directed the response, was a political leader displaying moral authority and leadership, with the platform to speak across the expanse of a county whose population is larger than that of most states.

“People want to see their elected official — they want to see who is in charge,” said Zev Yaroslavky, who spent 20 years as a member of the Los Angeles City Council and 20 years as a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. “In this particular case, the fact is you had two different big fires: one in the city of Los Angeles and one in the unincorporated area of the county. Who is in charge?”

Shawn Hubler contributed reporting.

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News

‘The Age of Trump’ Enters Its Second Decade

Published

6 hours ago

June 16, 2025

Press Room

‘The Age of Trump’ Enters Its Second Decade

The trip down that escalator took less than 30 seconds, but it opened a much longer journey for the man and his country.

It has been 10 years now, as of Monday, since Donald J. Trump descended to the lobby of his namesake tower to announce his campaign for president. Ten years of jaw-dropping, woke-busting, scandal-defying, status quo-smashing politics that have transformed America for good or ill in profoundly fundamental ways.

In those 10 years, Mr. Trump has come to define his age in a way rarely seen in America, more so than any president of the past century other than Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, even though he has never had anywhere near their broad public support. Somehow the most unpopular president in the history of polling has translated the backing of a minority of Americans into the most consequential political force of modern times, rewriting all of the rules along the way.

In a sense, it does not matter that Mr. Trump has actually occupied the White House for less than half of that 10 years. He has shaped and influenced the national discourse since June 16, 2015, whether in office or not. Every issue, every dispute, every conversation on the national level in that time, it seems, has revolved around him.

Even voter repudiation and criminal conviction did not slow him down or diminish his hold on the national imagination on the way to his comeback last November. The presidency of Joseph R. Biden Jr. turned out to be just an interregnum between Mr. Trump’s stints in power.

And power has become his leitmotif. Since his often-stumbling first term, when he was the only president never to have served in public office or the military and by his own admission did not really know what he was doing, Mr. Trump has learned how to wield power to great effect. He has claimed more of it than any of his predecessors ever did — and more of it, judging by the plethora of court rulings against him, than the Constitution entitles him to.

Whether he is on the cusp of dictatorship as his “No Kings” critics argue, he has certainly tried to dictate the course of society across the board, seeking to impose his will not just on Washington but on academia, culture, sports, the legal industry, the news media, Wall Street, Hollywood and private businesses. He wants to personally determine traffic congestion rules in New York and the playbill at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

And not through the art of persuasion or even the art of the deal, but through the force of threats and intimidation. He has embarked on a campaign of what he has called “retribution” against his political enemies. American troops have been deployed to the streets of Los Angeles to quell protests. Masked agents sweep through towns and cities across the country seizing immigrants, not just the criminals or the undocumented, but in some cases those with all the right papers who in one way or the other offended the president’s sensibilities.

“President Trump has been the dominant figure in American politics since he rode down the escalator to announce his candidacy in 2015,” said Douglas B. Sosnik, a longtime Democratic strategist who served as White House senior adviser to President Bill Clinton. “History will look back and say that we have been living in the age of Trump since then. Biden’s presidency was just a speed bump during this historic period of change in our country’s history.”

It is change that his allies consider a long-overdue course correction after decades of liberal hegemony that they say sought to control not just what Americans did but what they thought and were allowed to say out loud. He is in their view the desperately needed antidote to woke excesses, unrestrained immigration and economic dislocation. His Make America Great Again theme appeals to those who feel left behind and browbeaten by a self-dealing ruling class.

And he has succeeded to an extent that might not have been expected even a few months ago at shaking up the very foundations of the American system as it has been operating for generations, a system he and his allies argue was badly in need of shaking up.

Since reclaiming the presidency five months ago, he has dismantled whole government agencies, overturned the international trading system, gutted federally funded scientific research and made the very word “diversity” so radioactive that even companies and institutions outside his direct control are rushing to change their policies.

Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who has written multiple books extolling Mr. Trump, said the president had ushered in “a dramatic deep rebellion against a corrupt, increasingly radical establishment breaking the law to stay in power.”

Larry Kudlow, a national economics adviser to Mr. Trump in his first term, said the president “has transformed American thinking on border security, China trade, working-class wage protection and business prosperity.” Moreover, Mr. Kudlow added, “he has fostered a new conservative culture of patriotism, traditional family values, a revival of faith and American greatness.”

But while Mr. Trump’s supporters feel freed from the shackles of a suffocating left-wing elite obsessed with identity politics, his critics see a permission structure for racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Christian nationalism, white supremacy and hatred of transgender people.

“He sells the past,” said Christina M. Greer, the author of “How to Build a Democracy” and a political science professor at Fordham University. “He sells a version and vision of America that was only accessible to some.” She said that Mr. Trump “has exposed America — a fragile nation that can be torn apart quite quickly by the promise of cruelty. He is returning the nation to its true origin story, one that many would prefer to forget.”

The political shift embodied by Mr. Trump has defied resistance. Brief surges of progressive momentum have faded in the Age of Trump. Despite the #MeToo movement that transformed the American workplace, or perhaps in backlash to it, voters last year elected a president who had been found liable by a jury of sexually abusing a woman. Five years after the widespread protests against the police murder of George Floyd, Mr. Trump pressured Washington’s mayor to erase the “Black Lives Matter” street mural within sight of the White House.

Along the way, he has normalized the abnormal. Not only is he the first convicted felon elected president, but he has also dispensed with conflict-of-interest concerns that used to constrain other presidents and monetized the White House far more than anyone who has ever lived there. He has disproved the assumption that scandal is automatically a political death knell, so much so that even former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, who resigned in disgrace amid sexual harassment allegations, is now a front-runner to win election as mayor of New York.

He has also upended the old conventional wisdom that optimism was the key to success in presidential politics. Unlike Roosevelt and Reagan, who projected sunny confidence and offered an idealized view of America, Mr. Trump describes the country in dystopian terms like “hellhole,” “cesspools” and “garbage can.” He is a voice not so much of American greatness as American grievance, one that resonates with many voters.

Politics in the Age of Trump are not kinder and gentler, as President George H.W. Bush once promised, but coarse and corrosive. Mr. Trump seems to love nothing more than an enemy he can insult in scathing, sometimes scatological terms that would be familiar on a school playground but banned on prime-time television.

Others have taken their cue from him. Democrats were thrilled to have Gov. Gavin Newsom of California respond to Mr. Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in tough-guy, bring-it-on terms, daring the president to have him arrested and likening his tactics to those of “failed dictators.”

If the rhetoric is raw, politics have also grown increasingly violent, evoking the darker days of the 1960s. The assassination over the weekend of a Democratic lawmaker from Minnesota and her husband along with the shooting of another legislator and his wife served as a chilling reminder that political discourse has descended to physical danger. So too did two assassination attempts against Mr. Trump during last year’s campaign, one of which came just a couple of inches away from grisly success.

Both Roosevelt and Reagan emerged from assassination attempts with broad public support and sympathy, but today’s America is so polarized that the country is not brought together in moments of crisis for long. Mr. Trump pardoned supporters who beat police officers while storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and briefly considered pardoning men who were convicted of plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat, before dropping the idea.

Mr. Trump has brought the political fringe into the mainstream and even the corridors of power, installing people in positions of authority who would never have passed muster in previous administrations. And he has elevated conspiracy theories to the Oval Office, suggesting that the gold might have been stolen from Fort Knox, fanning old suspicions about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and continuing to lie about his own election defeat in 2020.

For all of the controversies, for all of the conflicts, Mr. Trump maintains a strong hold on his base if not with the broader public. The latest Gallup poll found his approval rating at 43 percent, lower than any other modern president at this stage of a new term or a second term, but essentially right in the same range it has been for most of the time since Mr. Trump stepped off that escalator in 2015.

The uncertainty about the Age of Trump is whether it survives Mr. Trump himself. Will Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson or other aspirants to the throne extend this era beyond its progenitor? Mr. Trump has scrambled old voting blocs and ideological scripts, but will he forge an enduring political and governing coalition?

His appeal often seems as personal as it is political, as much about the force of his identity as the force of his ideas. For a decade, he has been a singularly commanding presence in the life of the nation, invigorating to his admirers and infuriating to his detractors.

The Age of Trump still has more than three and a half years to go, at least by the Constitution, and many tests ahead.

News

Oil price falls back as flow of crude through Strait of Hormuz unaffected

Published

9 hours ago

June 16, 2025

Press Room

Oil price falls back as flow of crude through Strait of Hormuz unaffected

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Oil markets have shrugged off Israel’s threat to topple the Iranian regime, with crude exports from the Middle East so far unaffected by the escalating conflict.

Financial Times analysis of ship-tracking data shows there has been no significant impact on the movement of vessels through the critical Strait of Hormuz. Homayoun Falakshahi, head of crude oil at energy analytics firm Kpler, said their systems also showed no drop in the number of oil tankers transiting the strait.

About 21mn barrels of oil from Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates pass daily through the narrow waterway separating the Islamic republic from the Gulf states, representing about one-third of the world’s seaborne oil supplies.

“The market is reassured by the fact that we have seen attacks on energy infrastructure but they were constrained to the domestic energy systems in both countries,” Falakshahi said.

Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, rose as much as 5.5 per cent early on Monday to more than $78 a barrel, before giving up all of those gains to trade down 4.1 per cent just above $71.17. It has increased less than 4 per cent since the fighting began last week.

Over the weekend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that regime change could “certainly be the result” of Israel’s attacks on the Islamic Republic after he launched strikes against at least two Iranian gas processing plants and two fuel depots in Tehran. In response, Iran hit pipelines and transmission lines serving Israel’s largest refinery.

However, Israel has not targeted Iran’s key oil export terminals on Kharg Island and Tehran has not sought to disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

“I think the goal from Israel is to make internal logistics more difficult for Iran, rather than to rattle international markets,” Falakshahi said.

Line chart of Brent crude ($/barrel) showing Oil prices have steadied after last week's surge

He added that fewer tankers than normal appeared to be heading to Iran’s Kharg Island to load oil but that this is likely to be a temporary, precautionary measure, as had happened after Israel and Iran traded air strikes in October last year. One tanker loaded over the weekend but others appeared to have slowed their approach to the facility, which is responsible for 90 per cent of Iran’s oil exports, he said.

Iran currently produces about 3.2mn barrels of oil a day and exports just over half, almost exclusively to China.

While the Iranian regime has historically threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz in the event that the country is attacked, traders are betting that Tehran is less likely to seek to disrupt shipping given improved relations with Saudi Arabia and the need to keep its own exports flowing.

Tehran targeted vessels in the strait during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and more recently was accused of attacks on tankers near the strait in 2019. However, it has never been able to completely block traffic. Saudi Arabia restored diplomatic ties with Iran in 2023.

“Although there is concern that a broader conflict could cause the strategically critical Strait of Hormuz to close, [we] consider this risk as very low given it has never occurred in history,” JPMorgan’s commodities team wrote in a note.

The UK’s Maritime Trade Office on Monday said there had been a slight decrease in the number of large cargo ships transiting the strait over the past week but added that it identified no information pointing towards a blockade or closure.

Janiv Shah, an oil analyst at consultancy Rystad Energy, said a blockade would push markets into “uncharted territory”, but that this was an unlikely outcome.

Rather than shutting the strait, an alternative Iranian response could lead to Tehran seeking to strike oilfields in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, which are within the reach of its drones, say analysts.

In 2019 Iran was widely believed to be behind a drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s largest oil processing facility that temporarily cut the kingdom’s crude production by more than half and briefly pushed up global oil prices by as much as 20 per cent.

However, traders are betting that any such action will come into play only as a very last resort, according to Falakshahi.

“Currently no actor in the region, especially the two currently involved in the conflict, sees a benefit in hitting critical energy infrastructure,” he said.

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The suspect in the shooting of 2 Minnesota lawmakers has been captured and charged

Published

10 hours ago

June 16, 2025

Press Room

The suspect in the shooting of 2 Minnesota lawmakers has been captured and charged

This booking photo provided by the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office shows Vance Boelter in Green Isle, Minn., early Monday morning — shortly after a two-day manhunt ended in his capture and arrest.

Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office/AP

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Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office/AP

Law enforcement in Minnesota have arrested the man wanted in the attack early Saturday morning that killed one state lawmaker and left another wounded.

Vance Boelter, 57, was apprehended on Sunday night after what Brooklyn Park police Chief Mark Bruley called “the largest manhunt in state history.”

Vance Luther Boelter, age 57, is the suspect in targeting political shootings in Minnesota that left one Democratic lawmaker dead. A national manhunt is underway for Boelter who authorities say was last spotted on a camera in the city of Minneapolis. Boelter is shown here in photographs compiled by the FBI for a wanted poster.

Bruley said at a Sunday night press conference that officers had been searching the area of Boelter’s property near the town of Green Isle when one thought they saw him “running into the woods.” After about an hour and a half, with the help of multiple SWAT teams and a State Patrol helicopter, authorities closed in on him and were “able to call him out to us.”

“Where he was ultimately taken into custody was in a field,” Bruley said, adding that Boelter was armed at the time.

Boelter was the subject of a days-long man-hunt involving hundreds of local, state and federal law enforcement after the shocking deaths of Democratic state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband. Officials say the couple were shot and killed in their Brooklyn Park, Minn., home by a man impersonating a police officer.

This combo from photos provided by Minnesota Legislature shows from left, Senator John A. Hoffman and Rep. Melissa Hortman. (Minnesota Legislature via AP)

Earlier that same morning, Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were shot at their home in nearby Champlin, Minn. In a statement shared with Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar on Sunday night, Yvette said John “is enduring many surgeries right now and is closer every hour to being out of the woods.”

“He took 9 bullet hits,” she wrote. “I took 8 and we are both incredibly lucky to be alive.”

Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension superintendent Drew Evans told reporters on Sunday that Boelter had been charged with the Hortmans’ murders as well as the shooting of the Hoffmans. He said the FBI and and U.S. Attorney’s Office are reviewing whether to bring additional federal charges.

Boelter was booked into the Hennepin County Jail just after 1 a.m. Monday, and is due to appear in court later in the afternoon, MPR News reports.

What happened on Saturday

Vance Luther Boelter, age 57, is shown here in photographs compiled by the FBI for a wanted poster.

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FBI/FBI

Police say they initially responded to the shooting at Hoffman’s house, and then went to Hortman’s home. There, they saw a car with emergency lights out front, and a man at the door dressed in all blue with black body armor. Officials say that man shot at police, but was able to get away.

Authorities have yet to announce a possible motive for the attacks, but Minn. Gov. Tim Walz called the shootings “an act of targeted political violence.”

At a news conference Saturday, state police said they found a list of individuals inside what they say is Boelter’s vehicle. Hortman and Hoffman were on that list along with other lawmakers, including U.S. Senator Tina Smith and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who are also both Democrats.

Evans said Sunday that if officers hadn’t encountered Boelter at Hortman’s house, forcing him to abandon his vehicle, “I have every confidence that this would have continued throughout the day.”

Officials also said they found “No Kings” flyers in the car, a reference to the anti-Trump protests that happened around the country Saturday. Minnesota state officials urged residents to avoid the gatherings, though many still attended and the protests remained largely peaceful.

Other protests across the U.S. also remained largely peaceful, though not without incident: Police in Virginia arrested a man for recklessly driving his car through a crowd gathered to protest, hitting one person. In Texas, another man was arrested for making threats against state lawmakers there.

And on Sunday, Salt Lake City police announced the death of an “innocent bystander” who had been shot at a downtown protest, allegedly by a member of the event’s peacekeeping team who had been aiming at a different target: a person brandishing a rifle at demonstrators.

A backdrop of political violence

The shootings in Minnesota are part of a string of high-profile political violence across the country in recent years. In April, for example, a man allegedly set fire to Penn. Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home and faces charges including attempted murder, terrorism and aggravated arson.

Last year, the Brennan Center for Justice, a policy think tank, released a report saying nearly half of the state lawmakers it surveyed had experienced threats or attacks in recent years. At the federal level, the U.S. Capitol Police has documented a spike in threats against members of Congress.

And last summer, President Trump, who has often been criticized for stoking the intense emotions that can lead to political violence in the first place, survived an assassination attempt that left his ear bloodied and killed a person in the crowd.

In a post on social media, Trump condemned the shootings in Minnesota, saying that “such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America.”