Maybe?

 During the Iraq debacle, some idiot claimed that they were seeing "green shoots" of stability in the country racked by civil war. It's the same sort of thing I feel today, when I see the response to the state execution of Alex Pretti. The man was a literal Boy Scout, a literal choirboy. As Krugman notes, he is not being subjected to the same character assassination as Renee Good, who had the audacity to be a queer woman who didn't defer to the Big Strong Man sufficiently. Yglesias, who has developed a real knack for Steelmanning the indefensible, is actually unable to make the case for this bullshit. We are starting to see "unnamed sources close to the President" begin to ask very real questions about what is going on.

The videos of Pretti's murder are disturbing, but that is precisely the point. (I cannot fathom what his parents must thing, having to see the murder of their seemingly extraordinary son plastered across screens around America and the world.) The video makes it impossible for the Trump Administration to lie - or rather it has made it impossible for them to lie in a way that is defensible except by the hardest core of MAGA. 

Josh Marshall made the point about "escalation dominance" that clearly motivates Miller, Noem, Bovino and Lewandowski. They are "content creators" in our descent to fascism. 

They want the video.

Right up until they don't.

As of this moment, the GOP is fracturing over this issue. The public is appalled. They can try and push the narrative of Pretti having a gun on him, but that only infuriates the Second Amendment crowd. 

Trump believes in dominance politics, and his sending in shock troops and Brown Shirts to terrorize Minneapolis is an expression of that. 

He is also fickle and self-centered. If he sees this (if his addled brain is capable of taking in new information) and thinks "This is hurting me", then he will jettison people soon. If I had to guess that Lilliputian Martinet, Greg Bovino, would make an easy sacrifice. I wouldn't feel safe if I were Noem either, but Bovino is even more of an aesthetic embarrassment than Noem, as Trump doesn't like short little guys but like women who have butchered their faces for the male gaze. Seriously, I think that's it.

If Trump DOES throw aside Noem, I would absolutely expect her to go scorched earth, the way Marjorie Traitor Greene did. These are awful people - narcissistic, insecure, cruel - and they will turn on each other in a feral display of their own barbarism.

This is not "the end of Trump" and likely not even the end of Stephen Miller, despite him being the true architect of all this. However, we know Trump will case aside those he feels do not reflect well on him. This could be the moment when we begin to see them turn on each other.

I'm not necessarily optimistic, because after the initial outrage ends, the GOP will fall dutifully in-line. Still, it could be a start. Trump backed down over Greenland; he could back down here.