Vice signaling explains Trump’s enduring appeal

Last Friday, the day before Alex Pretti was killed by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis, Colorado Public Radio reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Eagle County, Colorado, had left ace of spades cards inside the cars of nine Latino immigrants they had detained. Family members found the cards, which read “Denver Field Office” and listed the address and contact information of a detention facility in the city of Aurora. 

The ace of spades has a violent and racist history attached to it. During the Vietnam War, American soldiers often left the cards on the bodies of dead Viet Cong guerillas and North Vietnamese soldiers. They were a symbol, death’s calling card. 

In a statement, a spokesperson from the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the agencies tasked with carrying out Donald Trump’s wide scale immigration raids, condemned the behavior as unauthorized and promised an investigation. “Under President Trump and Secretary [Kristi] Noem, ICE is held to the highest professional standard.” 

The action in Colorado is symbolic for the life-and-death morality play that is unfolding on the streets of Minneapolis and across the country as the administration’s mass deportation campaign intensifies.

On Saturday, Pretti, a 37-year-old American citizen, was held on the ground by Border Patrol agents and shot multiple times. He posed no danger to them.

Pretti was a nurse who worked at a local Veterans Affairs hospital. Nursing is a caring profession. His parents and friends described him as kind, generous, patient, empathetic and funny, willing to help anyone in need.

The Border Patrol agents who killed Pretti, and the ICE agents in Eagle County, Colorado, are violence workers. The government has given them the power to use lethal force and other types of violence. As demonstrated by their recruiting materials and behavior, the federal agencies tasked with carrying out Trump’s mass deportations increasingly operate as paramilitaries; they view undocumented immigrants, migrants and even Americans who oppose the Trump administration as enemies to be neutralized with maximum force. This is the logic of us versus them, war and counter-insurgency.

As Haley Swenson, an expert on gender equality and the care economy, recently wrote at Slate, “Pretti’s killers saw his care and concern not as an asset to our society, as the fabric that knits together a healthy community, but as a threat. After Pretti fell still on the ground, one ICE agent was filmed clapping.”

Trump administration officials blamed Pretti for his own death, smearing him as a “domestic terrorist” who planned to massacre federal law enforcement agents. Video footage of his killing taken from multiple angles shows this to be a willful lie. 

As public outrage against Pretti’s killing has grown in recent days, including from some Republicans, the president has backpedaled on some of his more incendiary rhetoric. But this is window-dressing; the administration shows no signs of backing off its mass deportation campaign. 

In reality, Pretti’s killing — along with that of Renee Good on Jan. 7 in Minneapolis, and a broader pattern of excessive and often lethal force against protesters, immigrants, migrants and others deemed the enemy  — are not random. They are not the result of “a few bad apples.”

Trump himself sits at the center of this permission structure for violence. The Supreme Court has made him a de facto absolute monarch. He behaves as though he is outside of the law, recognizing no limits on his behavior except those imposed by his own personal “morality” and routinely shattering norms of responsible governance, democracy and basic human decency. In an example of the leader-follower dynamic, Trump’s pathological and corrupt behavior trickles down and is copied by his followers, and often by the culture as a whole. 

There is a term for this permission structure: vice signaling.

On the surface, vice signaling appears to be the opposite of virtue signaling, philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò recently wrote. 

A virtue signaler is trying to look good and a vice signaler is trying to look bad—but not to everyone. A vice signaler typically violates moral or other standards of an out-group precisely in order to look good to the fellow members of some in-group. Vice signaling, then, is typically a version of virtue signaling rather than an alternative to it.

But there’s an important catch. When we virtue signal, we are appealing to our tribe’s own values, however shallow or hypocritical such appeals might be: it is the fact that our in-group treats supporting this charity or using those pronouns as a demonstration of kindness and respect that allows one to try to gain clout by adhering to the rules despite having less savory motivations in one’s secret heart. But when one vice signals, the out-group’s values take center stage — in order to be shirked rather than lived up to. The moral commitments of the in-group are basically irrelevant: all that matters is owning the enemy, in Trump’s case the libs. And the more one relies on vice signaling as a style of action and communication, the less relevant and powerful the in-group’s moral compass is as a practical constraint on anyone’s behavior.

In other words, vice signaling is about naked corrupt power — and the ability to impose it on others with impunity. Trump’s actions in Minneapolis — as well as in Venezuela, Nigeria and Greenland — signal, according to Táíwò, “a certain aesthetic posture to the MAGA base and its various ideological co-conspirators, training us all to allow it, and threatening all those who might disobey with the specter that the bombs will come for them next. The message says, I can do what I want, when I want, for whatever reason I want, and you have to take it.”

This is the message communicated by ICE, Border Patrol and other federal law enforcement agencies in their role as Trump’s enforcers.

In the aftermath of the tragic events in Minneapolis, prominent public voices spoke in explicitly moral terms about the country’s growing democracy crisis. Former Presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden all condemned the violence, emphasizing that such actions violate core American values and constitutional norms.

“The killing of Alex Pretti is a heartbreaking tragedy,” Obama and his wife Michelle said in a statement. “It should also be a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault.”

Biden echoed this sentiment. “We are not a nation that tramples the 4th Amendment and tolerates our neighbors being terrorized,” he said. “Violence and terror have no place in the United States of America, especially when it’s our own government targeting American citizens.”

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Clinton similarly warned that, “Over the course of a lifetime, we face only a few moments where the decisions we make and the actions we take will shape our history for years to come. This is one of them.”

The Trump administration is rapidly losing control of its narrative surrounding the mass deportation campaign and what some are calling “The Battle for Minneapolis.” Public opinion polls show that support for Trump’s immigration policies is now below 50% and dropping.

Border Patrol “commander at large” Gregory Bovino has been demoted and reassigned from overseeing operations in Minneapolis and replaced by border czar Tom Homan. Noem is also under fire, including from some Republicans, and is the target of an impeachment effort by House Democrats.

In a rare move, Trump said on Tuesday that he planned to “de-escalate a little bit” in Minneapolis. He offered no details about what this would entail.

In the end, removing Bovino, Noem or other senior leaders — and replacing them with people who have similar values and beliefs — will likely do little to change the actual behavior of federal agents under their command.

Vice signaling — and the broader moral crisis it sustains — are defining features of the Age of Trump. Such forces are far greater and more enduring than any one person or leader, including Trump, and they will be with us far into the future.

It is true that Trumpism and MAGA are not forever. But they may be generational, and this is the struggle that pro-democracy Americans and other people of conscience must be prepared to win.

“There’s so much happening to us at once, so much evil and ugliness around the country that we have to digest that it can’t help but infect our spirits,” philosopher Eddie Glaude Jr. said in a video he shared on social media following Good’s killing. “[The administration and broader right-wing] have an entire plan, I think, ready to implement for massive protests that look and take the form of the 1960s social revolution. That’s what they’re prepared for. We have to do something different. We have to be more imaginative in how we respond to this moment. We have to be more imaginative.”

The great pains of the Age of Trump, our suffering democracy and the recent tragedies in Minneapolis may, in some way, be the pains of birth. They demand that we ask ourselves: What burdens are we prepared to bear? What undiscovered country do we still have the courage to bring into being?