Political opinion usually shifts slowly, but history shows that certain events can force sudden, irreversible change. The killings linked to ICE enforcement may mark such a moment in the United States.

There are moments in history, science, politics and other areas when a tipping point is reached – a critical point is where a situation, process, or system beyond which a significant and often unstoppable effect or change takes place.

The US researcher, G Elliott Morris identifies Minnesota and the ICE atrocities as one of them.

He cites _Rational Public_ (a 1992 book by political scientists Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro) who suggest collective public opinion is often remarkably stable and US views on most issues shift only a few percentage points a decade.

They argue, Morris says, opinion changes require new information which meet five conditions simultaneously – when it is received by enough people; understood; relevant to the policy question or issue; discrepant with prior beliefs; and, credible.

Obviously media developments since 1922 have accelerated the rate at which these simultaneous conditions move throughout societies.

The Page-Shapiro book uses the January-February 1968 Vietnam Tet Offensive as a classic example. After the Tet offensive US opinion in April 1968 indicated that people thought the war was a mistake.

Before that the US and Australia were bewitched by the so-called Domino Theory in which communists were believed to be about to take country after country in Southeast Asia.

But by late 1968 opposition to the war surpassed 50 per cent. Streets and cities were beset with demonstrations and campus rallies, and growing Congressional disapproval was destroying Johnson’s reputation.

Ironically, without Vietnam, LBJ would be regarded as one of the greatest US Presidents – up there with Lincoln and Roosevelt and far more significant than JFK: tackling racial discrimination; something probably only a President from the South could do; and building his Great Society program.

Before the Presidency, in the 1930s, he achieved an enormous amount for Texas and the south with a massive public works program which provided employment and much overdue infrastructure from dams to roads using New Deal funds.

In retrospect we can see LBJ’s Presidency as a tragedy caused by the US conventional wisdom about the threat of communism.

The 2003 Iraq invasion and subsequent war went through a similar development. In this case, Morris argues, the Abu Ghraib scandal of George W Bush’s Presidency was an example of a tipping point. When the US invaded Iraq, 70 per cent of Americans approved of the War. After Abu Ghraib it fell slowly and then quickly as the war became a quagmire.

Morris now says: “The ICE shootings and Trump Administration’s response to those shootings satisfy all the tipping point conditions.

“The videos of federal officers killing US citizens have been received by a vast majority of adults; the public understand it and see it as directly relevant to whether ICE enforcement has gone too far.”

Most importantly the propaganda the Trump administration is putting out “is sharply discrepant with reality,” Morris says.

Meanwhile, the attempts to defend ICE and Trump are pathetic beyond belief – seeming to ignore the fact that millions of Americans (and the world) have seen the videos and have seen how the reality destroys the Trump administration’s claims.

But rather than focusing on that a political analyst, Rachael Bade, argued in a Substack essay that Trump’s latest scandal is the biggest PR crisis of Trump’s second term.

The problem is that this is now far beyond PR and turning the tide – it’s more like being hit by a tsunami. The reality is reflected in ongoing polling where Trump, his immigration policies and ICE are all well underwater. Indeed, there are now majorities in polls supporting the abolition of ICE.

Elliot Morris says: “Tipping points once crossed, don’t usually reverse; that’s why they are called tipping points. ICE and DHS are young institutions. Sixteen months ago, the idea that they might face genuine accountability, structural reform and abolition seemed politically absurd. Today it doesn’t.”

And there is probably nothing Trump can do about that the political ramifications of this tipping point – short of the Supreme Court ruling that he is allowed to be a dictator.