Almost immediately after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Good, the Trump administration wasted little time settling on a narrative that it expected Americans to believe: The victim was the villain of the story.

As far as the White House and its allies were concerned, Good committed “an act of domestic terrorism” as part of a “coordinated” conspiratorial effort, hatched by people “being trained” to use vehicles as weapons. Donald Trump went so far as to tell the public, in writing, that the young mom “viciously ran over” an ICE officer with her vehicle.

The unbelievable claims were discredited by video evidence and by local officials. The president and his team peddled the lines anyway, hoping not only to smear the victim but also to convince Americans not to believe their lying eyes.

By and large, this didn’t work. We are, however, watching a Republican team with a playbook that only has one page.

And so, 17 days after Good’s slaying, when federal agents shot and killed an intensive care nurse named Alex Pretti on a Minneapolis street in broad daylight — violence that was well documented by several cameras — members of Team Trump ran the only play they knew. As a New York Times analysis summarized:

Twice since the start of the year, federal officers have gunned down protesters in Minneapolis with cellphone cameras rolling, and twice President Trump and his lieutenants have rushed forward with a message to the American people: Don’t believe what you see with your own eyes.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” host Kristen Welker asked an important question to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who too often acts as if it’s part of his job to run political interference for the White House. One aspect of the public outrage, Welker reminded her guest, “is that they feel as though the federal government is asking them to believe something that they don’t see with their own two eyes. Is that what the administration is asking of the American people, to believe that [Pretti] was violent when the video, based on what everyone has seen so far, does not show that?”

In his response, Blanche, a former Trump defense attorney, said, “You shouldn’t try to gaslight the administration about what happened.”

No, of course not. After all, it’s the administration’s job to gaslight the public about what happened.

My second book was about Republican efforts to rewrite recent history and the party’s Orwellian pattern of responding to political crises by demanding that Americans not believe their lying eyes. Unable to respond to the facts surrounding humiliations such as Trump’s Russia scandal, GOP officials pushed outlandish counternarratives in the hopes of bullying Americans’ memories into submission, even if that meant urging people to discount their own life experiences.

What became clear over the weekend, however, is the degree to which the timeline has compressed. When Republicans tried to rewrite the story of the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, for example, the efforts unfolded in earnest in the months after the insurrectionist violence at the Capitol.

After Pretti was killed, Team Trump didn’t wait months, weeks or even days. Rather, officials set out to rewrite the story within hours of the deadly violence.

The ICU nurse who worked at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Minneapolis was, in the words of the White House’s Stephen Miller, a “domestic terrorist” and a would-be “assassin.” Gregory Bovino, who helps lead Border Patrol operations, said it would be wrong to speculate too much about the incident, but he nevertheless felt comfortable telling Americans that Pretti intended to “massacre law enforcement.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem peddled so many absurd and offensive lies that it was difficult to keep up with her avalanche of mendacity, though it was especially unsettling to see her insist that the victim was “brandishing” a weapon when he was not.

The falsehoods weren’t just at odds with eyewitness accounts, they were also plainly contradicted by unambiguous video evidence that documented exactly what happened. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison told The Washington Post that administration’s claims are “flat-out insane.”

The administration surely knows this. It also doesn’t appear to care.

Republicans brazenly set out to rewrite recent history, in part because they believe they have to — the truth is too horrific or too humiliating to be left intact — and in part because they believe they can get away with it, especially as media outlets aligned with GOP politics agree to stick to the agreed-upon script.

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” George Orwell wrote in his dystopian classic “1984.” “It was their final, most essential command.”

It will fall on Americans to decide whether to accept reality or believe a counternarrative with no foundation in the truth.