This past year, and especially in these past few weeks, the faith of Americans and essential trust of the free world has been shaken in ways most of us thought we’d never see.

Generations who assumed they could always count on the world’s greatest democracy now wonder every time they glance at their news screens. They see all the to-ing and fro-ing on Ukraine; then how a military putsch-came-to-shove in Venezuela, and that somehow led into all that easy-peasy table-talk about troops seizing Greenland (a NATO shattering strategery everyone says no one believes).

Meanwhile, our homeland has plunged itself into a police state shame that is America’s once unfathomable ICE Age.

And then it seems like an almost daily occurrence that we see fact-checking news reporting that President Donald Trump has made a claim or said something that was provably untrue. So it is that here and all around the planet people are wondering: What in the world has happened to the globe’s forever good guys?

Well, perhaps the easiest one to fix is the lies and distortions. And the easiest way to fix it is to create a coalition that can convince Trump to curb his much-ridiculed penchant for lying and distorting– and stick to dishing facts that have the added virtue of being real.

After all, Trump’s penchant for lying isn’t just an obsession of anti-Trump folks. It also is a very quiet concern of Trump’s MAGA loyalists. So we are hoping today that we can enlist our fellow Americans who proudly wear their “MAGA” labels to lead a positive effort to persuade their leader to end this one presidential habit that even they find embarrassing and inexplicable. For even MAGA Americans realize Trump’s persistence in telling lies and factual distortions has damaged the ability of America’s leader to be an effective leader of the free world – and of our 50 states.

This week provided us with a tragic but quite obvious example here in our homeland: Wednesday’s rush to vent what videos later revealed were distorted and false claims about what really happened in Minneapolis when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot to death a mother of three who was apparently blocking a street with her SUV as ICE vehicles were coming.

And make no mistake – they seem correct about how it started. Renee Nicole Good apparently was protesting the ICE operation by stopping her maroon Honda Pilot across a street’s right lane, with its front facing the center of the road.

But a new video shows Good pleasantly greeting ICE agent Jonathan E. Ross, as he was circling her car, making a video that included Renee Good’s license plate and her smiling assurance as she spoke to him through her open driver’s side window: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”

Just minutes later, Ross would shoot and kill the mother of three. And just hours after that, Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Vice President JD Vance were distorting what happened – insisting to the world that Renee Good was a domestic terrorist.

Videos showed us what actually happened: An ICE pickup truck drove up and stopped where Good’s SUV blocked the street. One agent got out and – never identifying himself – began yelling profanely for her to get out of her SUV. He grabbed her door handle with his right hand, reached through her open driver’s window with his left hand. No one was in front of her car at that moment. She seemed focused on getting away from the agent at her left. Then a second – Ross – finished his circling her Honda by walking in front of her vehicle from the passenger side and stopping in front of her left front fender.

But nobody can tell if she even saw Ross – because that other agent was reaching through her open driver’s side window and she was trying to get away from him. Her backup lights lit – and she backed up as Ross drew his gun and aimed through the windshield and at her. Then she drove forward, turning her steering wheel to the right – apparently to Ross. He shot once. We couldn’t tell clearly whether the front fender clipped him, grazed him or missed him. But he remained standing as her accelerating SUV turned right. Now standing beside the driver’s open window, he fired twice more as her car was driving away from him. It sped down the street and crashed into a parked car. She died there.

Noem, in Brownsville, Texas, rushed to make quick, but wildly inaccurate, statements – long before we saw any video. She accused the driver of “an act of domestic terrorism.” She said ICE agents were pushing vehicles that “got stuck in the snow” – but the video showed no snow on the street. She said agents were “attempting to push out their vehicle and a woman attacked them and those surrounding them and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle.” No agents were pushing vehicles – and that wasn’t at all what happened. Noem later dropped her initial descriptions – but still insists it was domestic terrorism and that the agent’s shootings were self-defense.

MAGA’s leaders and followers all saw the video we saw. Trump trusts his loyalists. He’d be helped if he heard their version of the truth and amended his rush to denounce and distort.

Here’s what Trump claimed in his Truth Social post that he saw on that same video we all saw: “…the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense…”

Time out: The video didn’t show that Good “viciously ran over” the shooting agent. It showed we couldn’t tell if the front fender clipped the agent, brushed him or narrowly missed him. But it showed the shooting agent remained standing and continued firing.

Trump added it is “hard to believe he is alive, but (he) is now recovering in the hospital.” Actually, it is hard to believe the agent who shot her was even hit by a moving SUV – because after he shot the woman and her car crashed, the video we all watched and Trump claimed he did too showed the agent walking all the way down the block to see the wreckage and the woman he just shot. And then the agent who Trump described as so lucky to still be alive was seen in the video walking at a rather rapid pace back up the block to his parked car, near where the confrontation began.

Later Thursday, Vance called Good “a deranged leftist” – adding: “It’s a tragedy of her own making.” And he told a White House briefing that reporters “should be ashamed” of their inaccurate coverage of the whole episode.

Now more than ever, we need to Make America Great Again. We’ll need all the help we can get.

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