This is the pattern: assert first, rationalize later.

Good morning! Today in the land of official truths, something bizarre happened: reality showed up uninvited, armed with video evidence, judges, and foreign governments who refuse to be coerced. It turns out that claims uttered loudly, confidently, and with every air horn available are surprisingly vulnerable to something quaintly known as facts — and unfortunately for Donald Trump and the White House, a few of them have now gone public.

In the grand theatrical production that was the official account of Alex Pretti’s death, the script has begun to unravel. Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive-care nurse who by all available footage was filming federal agents and attempting to assist a woman pushed to the ground, was initially portrayed as if he had leapt from a storybook titled “The Worst Threat in American History.”

But . . .

But . . .

But actual video evidence and multiple respected news outlets show something far more mundane: a man standing with a phone, not a weapon, surrounded by agents yelling, spraying pepper spray, and, within seconds, gunfire.

It appears that the official version, which is being promulgated with the zeal of carnival barkers who discovered authority, may have been less documentary and more dramatic reinterpretation. Even the administration’s own internal review of the shooting by United States Customs and Border Protection reportedly includes no verified account of Pretti brandishing a firearm or presenting a credible threat that justified lethal force. Can you imagine: lethal force.

Faced with these unwelcome interruptions from reality, the administration’s spokespeople pivoted with admirable efficiency… toward paperwork. Stephen Miller, once eager to label Alex Pretti a terrorist before the body had even cooled, now claims agents “may not have been” following proper protocol — a phrase so softly spoken it might have been uttered by a polite librarian correcting a footnote.

This is the pattern: assert first, rationalize later. The motto seems to be “Shout loudly and hope no one remembers what they saw.” But videos, those stubborn videos, are proving tenacious. Even members of the press, judges, and our supposed allies abroad are less inclined to accept narratives that collapse under the weight of their own contradictions.

And why should they? When a scene is captured on body-camera footage, captured from multiple angles on phone cameras, reviewed by courts, and scrutinized by journalists across the ideological spectrum, it has a way of outlasting an administration’s lying Twitter thread.

Thus, the White House is slowly, methodically, publicly learning a lesson once taught to every student of logic: you can’t fix a paper trail by yelling louder than the documentation.

This week’s chaos, (yes, chaos on a weekly basis) documented, resisted, and legally challenged, reminds us that in a republic where laws once constrained power, power must still contend with evidence. And when evidence shows up with receipts, even the most confident proclamations become subjects of investigation rather than unquestioned truth.

History may not have a reset button, but reality does. Reality is real, and it keeps refreshing. In the end, the only thing louder than a misleading (lying) official narrative may be the video evidence saying otherwise.