David Remnick

That's our program for today.

Thanks for listening.

See you next time.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick.

It was just over a week ago that Donald Trump announced to the world this.

Sometimes you need a dictator.

He's made a dictator joke before, but this was no joke.

It was a simple statement of how Trump views democracy and the rule of law as hindrances to asserting his own will over the nation and the world.

Trump made the dictator remark at the World Economic Forum in Davos as he was threatening to seize Greenland from Denmark and end the post-war order.

But back home, we were looking at quite another side of the same coin, an American city, Minneapolis, seemingly in a state of siege.

Federal agents were going door to door, demanding identification from people on the street and detaining those who got in their way.

Renee Good, a poet, had already been killed and others had been wounded, but that did nothing to moderate their tactics.

Then Alex Preti, a nurse, was shot and killed in a hail of bullets after he came to the aid of a protester.

The administration did what, frankly, a dictatorship does.

They said that Preti, who had been carrying a licensed firearm that he never brandished, was in fact a terrorist, an assassin, and they justified the killing.

We're going to talk about Minneapolis today and what it bodes for this country.

Emily Witt and Ruby Kramer have been reporting from the city, and I spoke with them this past week.

They're both staff riders for The New Yorker.

Emily, you reported on the protests in Los Angeles last summer, and now you're in your hometown of Minneapolis.