IMAGENS DE OVOODOCORVO
US politics
Trump has reached the 'mad emperor' stage, and
it's terrifying to behold
Richard
Wolffe
He incites violence from the safety of a bunker, then
orders peaceful people tear-gassed for the sake of a surreal photo op
@richardwolffedc
Tue 2 Jun
2020 09.13 BSTFirst published on Tue 2 Jun 2020 06.29 BST
Writing
from a Birmingham jail, Martin Luther King Jr famously told his anxious fellow
clergymen that his non-violent protests would force those in power to negotiate
for racial justice. “The time is always ripe to do right,” he wrote.
On an early
summer evening, two generations later, Donald Trump walked out of the White
House, where he’d been hiding in a bunker. Military police had just fired
teargas and flash grenades at peaceful protesters to clear his path, so that he
could wave a Bible in front of a boarded church.
 |
| IMAGEM DE OVOODOCORVO |
For Trump,
the time is always ripe to throw kerosene on his own dumpster fire.
In the week
since George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officers, Trump has watched
and tweeted helplessly as the nation he pretends to lead has reached its
breaking point. After decades of supposedly legal police beatings and murders,
the protests have swept America’s cities more quickly than even coronavirus.
This is no
coincidence of timing. In other crises, in other eras, there have been
presidents who understood their most basic duty: to calm the violence and
protect the people. In this crisis, however, we have a president who built his
entire political career as a gold-painted tower to incite violence.
We were
told, by Trump’s supporters four years ago, that we should have taken him
seriously but not literally. As it happened, it was entirely appropriate to
take him literally, as a serious threat to the rule of law.
During his
2016 campaign, he encouraged his supporters to assault protesters. “Knock the
crap out of them, would you? Seriously, OK,” he said on the day of the Iowa
caucuses. “I promise you I will pay for the legal fees.” Later in Las Vegas, he
said the security guards were too gentle with another protester. “I’d like to
punch him in the face,” he said.
Sure
enough, a protester was sucker-punched on his way out of a rally the following
month.
No wonder
Trump was sued for incitement to riot by three protesters who were assaulted as
they left one of his rallies in Kentucky. The case ultimately failed, but only
after a judge ruled that Trump recklessly incited violence against an African
American woman by a crowd that included known members of hate groups.
So when he
stood, as president, and told a crowd of police officers to be violent with
arrested citizens, it wasn’t some weird joke or misstatement, no matter what
his aides claimed afterwards. “When you see these thugs being thrown into the
back of a paddy wagon, you just see ’em thrown in, rough, I said, ‘Please don’t
be too nice.’
“I have to
tell you, you know, the laws are so horrendously stacked against us, because
for years and years, they’ve been made to protect the criminal,” he added.
“Totally made to protect the criminal. Not the officers. You do something
wrong, you’re in more jeopardy than they are.”
Trump was
happily inciting police violence a year after charges were dropped against
several Baltimore officers who somehow allowed Freddie Gray to die of severe
neck injuries in the back of their paddy wagon.
Then again,
Trump took out a full-page ad calling for the death penalty for the five boys
and young men wrongfully arrested as the Central Park Five in 1989. Just last
year he refused to apologise for his racist incitement in that case.
Trump can
no more end today’s violence than he can manage a pandemic that has killed more
than 100,000 Americans, or create the jobs that will rescue more than 40
million unemployed.
Faced with
a threefold crisis of racial, health and economic disasters, we have a
three-year-old in the Oval Office.
Our
get-tough president started his day by telling the nation’s governors that the
world was laughing at them – a recurring nightmare that he loves to project on
to everyone else.
“You have
to dominate or you’ll look like a bunch of jerks,” he declared, speaking as
something of a world-class jerk. “You have to arrest and try people,” he said
of the protesters that he called “terrorists”.
One of the
Democratic governor-jerks decided to draw the line at Trump’s rhetoric. “I need
to say that people are feeling real pain out there and we’ve got to have
national leadership in calling for calm and making sure that we’re addressing
the concerns of the legitimate peaceful protesters,” said JB Pritzker of
Illinois, during a conference call between the president and state governors.
“That will help us to bring order.”
“OK well
thank you very much, JB,” our infant-in-chief reportedly responded. “I don’t
like your rhetoric much either because I watched it with respect to the
coronavirus, and I don’t like your rhetoric much either. I think you could’ve
done a much better job, frankly.”
Yeah. And
he probably smells too.
Later in
the day, Trump demonstrated to the world that he had learned precisely nothing
in his three and a half years in charge of the world’s most diverse nation.
“I am your
president of law and order,” he said in the Rose Garden, as thousands of
Americans protested against the nation’s agents of law and order. Trump said he
would mobilise “all available federal resources, civilian and military, to stop
the rioting and looting” to protect “your second amendment rights”.
If you’ve
missed all the protesters seizing weapons from NRA members, you’re not alone.
That last bit was a call to arms for every vigilante to escalate the violence.
We have somehow devolved from dog whistle to foghorn politics.
There is no
end of Republican arsonists who have happily torched their lifelong support for
states’ rights and their diehard opposition to an all-powerful central
government.
Senator Tom
Cotton from Arkansas tweeted that the protesters – he prefers to call them
terrorists – should face combat troops on American streets. “Let’s see how
tough these Antifa terrorists are when they’re facing off with the 101st
Airborne Division,” he wrote of the Screaming Eagles, who actually killed real
fascists in the D-Day landings.
Never mind
the actual law of the land that expressly prohibits the US military from
domestic law enforcement, unless a state governor requests it.
This is a
president that cannot decide if he’s serious about shooting looters and
protesters or just warning that they might get accidentally shot. “It was
spoken as a fact, not as a statement,” Trump helpfully explained on Friday,
before spending the weekend threatening them with “vicious dogs” and “ominous
weapons”.
That was a
day before he said his administration “will always stand against violence,
mayhem and disorder”.
Confused?
That’s the point of this endlessly corrupted story where the aggressor is a
peace-loving victim, and the victim is a hateful aggressor.
When he
wrote his legendary letter, King was sitting in jail after marching in defiance
of a ban against anti-segregation protests. The man who is now a national icon
was jailed just one month before the city’s police chief set fire hoses and
dogs on children who were also defying the ban.
“More and
more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively
than have the people of good will,” King wrote. “We will have to repent in this
generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but
for the appalling silence of the good people.”
Trump has
used his time in the White House far more effectively than anyone could have
imagined. He ignored the dead and dying in Puerto Rico and brutalised the
children at the border. He ignored the dead and dying in the pandemic and wants
to brutalise the protesters in our cities.
In five
months, the good people can end both his hateful words and their own appalling
silence.
 |
| IMAGEM DE OVOODOCORVO |
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário