ICE Shooting Exposes Left’s Distrust of Trump Government Getting Worse

Screenshot via Kash Patel’s Twitter/FBI

This week, a gunman named Joshua Jahn opened fire at a Dallas ICE facility, killing one detainee and critically wounding two others before turning the weapon on himself. Among the debris, investigators found a chilling clue: an unused bullet etched with “ANTI-ICE.”

The message was unambiguous. And yet, a striking phenomenon immediately emerged: some on the left refused to accept the image released by the authorities, instead questioning the FBI under President Donald Trump. The act itself was filtered through deep and reasonable suspicion. The left, long accustomed to mocking “deep state” conspiracies on the right, has now adopted some version of it.

But there is a critical asymmetry to note. Right-wing skepticism has historically been ideological, often deployed as a rhetorical tool. “Deep state” narratives, amplified by Trump, cast federal agencies as inherently corrupt, a permanent foil to political legitimacy. These claims are often strategic, preemptive, and untethered from immediate evidence, instead relying on convenient narratives that are repeated.

Trump routinely portrayed the FBI as a partisan instrument, from his repeated attacks on the Russia investigation as a “witch hunt” to his insinuations that career prosecutors and intelligence officials were working to undermine his presidency. Similar rhetoric framed the Department of Justice as hostile to conservative priorities, and he repeatedly suggested that mainstream federal law enforcement was complicit in a broader conspiracy to suppress his political agenda, despite scads of evidence that supported the criminal investigations.

These Trump-led narratives function less as critiques of specific failures than as a delegitimization of the institutions themselves, creating a perspective in which any future enforcement or investigation is automatically suspect. And his re-election to a second term demonstrated just how effective this was in shifting the focus of suspicion from his questionable actions to those who sought to investigate them.

The left’s skepticism, by contrast, is largely reactive and far more evidence-based. Institutional missteps have accumulated: the mishandling of the Epstein files, bungled intelligence in the Charlie Kirk shooting, and ongoing controversies under Trump-era law enforcement have given reason for doubt.

This is best and most recently exemplified by progressive influencer Aaron Rupar , who cast doubt on the ANTI-ICE shell casing photo, in which he wrote, “We cannot trust the FBI under Trump.”

This is less a rhetorical flourish than a reflection of lived experience. For the left, mistrust is a rational adaptation; for the right, it has long been a political posture.

The ICE facility assailant is almost irrelevant in this broader trend. A suburban man with (so far) no manifesto and no overt political affiliation, he left a violent act and a message. The bullet he left behind, however, has become a mirror, reflecting not his mind but ours. Conservatives quite reasonably see a clear ideological attack, which is another in a growing trend. Skeptics on the left immediately see potential manipulation or incompetence.

The act of violence is interpreted before it is understood. Facts are no longer anchors; they are symbols, malleable and pliable, feeding the next round of outrage.

This is not to say that there is often reason for outrage across the political spectrum. But big picture, whats more concerning is that this is now the new American landscape: a nation in which even self-evident reality is negotiable, where institutional mistrust has gone bipartisan, and where political violence becomes performative rather than informative.

The asymmetry matters because it clarifies the stakes. The left has recent examples to doubt the FBI under Kash Patel and DOJ under Pam Bondi, evidenced by Trump’s social media messages directing her to go after his political enemies. The right’s distrust is a deeper strain, long cultivated over decades of “Government is bad” messaging starting with Ronald Reagan. Yet the consequences converge in a bizarre horseshoe of mistrust: a collapse of shared epistemic ground. Evidence alone no longer settles debate; interpretive narrative is king.

The tragedy of Dallas is dual. There is, of course, the immediate human toll—lives lost, families traumatized. And there is the structural toll: a democracy in which trust and social contracts we all want to abide by —  the glue of civic life — has worn thin beyond its utility. The left’s journey into deep-state-style skepticism, born of recent institutional failures, signals more than political polarization—it signals the erosion of the very mechanisms through which a society processes reality.

The shooters motives may never be fully discerned. The “ANTI-ICE” inscription may ultimately mean little in the arc of justice. But the societal reflection it has generated is unmistakable. The left’s skepticism, once protective and principled, has become structurally identical to the right’s ideological distrust.

And in that convergence, we glimpse the fragility of a democracy in which facts are filtered through tribal suspicion, and reality itself has become negotiable. The Dallas shooting is not just a tragedy; it is a signal, a small, brutal warning of a far deeper decay.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.