Trump just pulled a Jeffrey Dahmer-style justification for murdering innocent Americans

When Donald Trump appeared on The Will Cain Show on Jan. 27, 2026, the interview was pitched as another MAGA media moment. But one line revealed something far darker about how Trump thinks about innocent civilian deaths. It almost sounds like something Jeffrey Dahmer would say in his defense.

During the interview in Iowa, Will Cain discussed Trump’s immigration enforcement surge and the national blowback from the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good. But Trump tried to frame the controversy as a problem of reporting, not policy. 

Cain brought up a conversation they’d had a year and a half earlier about how hard it is to enforce immigration laws. He told Trump,

You looked at me and said, ‘It’s going to be difficult when the New York Times runs a picture of a little kid taken away from their mother. It’s going to be difficult.’ (via Roll Call)

The two also likened that to the recent controversy surrounding the ICE using a 5-year-old as bait in their operation. But hastily, they called it false reporting. Right after, Trump agreed that enforcing immigration laws is tough, but insistedthat when the media seizes on one troubling frame, it overwhelms everything else. 

Then came the part that should have snapped every MAGA maniac awake. Trump praised his enforcement, saying, “We take out 25 murderers, we take out drug dealers, we take out the whole group of people by the thousands.” Then, trying to clap at critics, he made a disastrous statement. “If we get one person a little bit wrong, [it’s suddenly] headlines.” Pause on that logic.

This is the sort of reasoning you might imagine a serial killer using to justify himself. “I’ve eaten thousands of meals, but if I eat one person and they happen to run in the street, that makes headlines.” That is exactly the structure of Trump’s comment, as one user on X said. He celebrated the killing of people he labels criminals, but dismissed innocent deaths as “a little bit wrong.”

In essence, Trump made civilian murders sound seemingly unimportant compared to the aggregate. He was defending a brutal enforcement campaign that had already killed at least two U.S. citizens during protests in Minneapolis. Video evidence from bystanders contradicts the initial federal narrative in both cases.

But Trump’s comment reveals a worldview. For him, the death of an innocent citizen is a tolerable cost if the ends, i.e., removal of “criminals,” are deemed worthy enough. This is cynical at best, and chilling at worst. In either case, it should be anathema to the MAGA base.