Editorial

Trump Goes Full Fascist

Donald Trump must have thought the video of Minneapolis’ Third Precinct Police Station in flames was a gift to his flagging re-election campaign. Perhaps an appeal to law and order, with the video of burning buildings and looters in Minneapolis and elsewhere, would provide the much-needed distraction from his incompetent response to the coronavirus pandemic, which had already claimed more than 100,000 lives since the first cases were reported in February and plunged the nation into the greatest recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

But Trump overplayed his hand, berating local and state officials as weak for not doing more to put down the rallies protesting the May 25 killing of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis police. Trump invoked the 1807 Insurrection Act to send in federal troops to crush the protests. “We’re going to do something that people haven’t seen before,” he said, “but you got to have total domination, and then you have to put them in jail.”

Then the Trump administration, in one action, violated every tenet of the First Amendment: A half hour before a curfew was supposed to take effect in Washington on June 1, Trump’s minions ordered troops guarding the White House to clear a peaceful crowd from Lafayette Park that included protesters and credentialed journalists. The storm troopers used tear gas canisters, grenades containing rubber pellets and flash bombs to scatter the crowd. They also gassed a priest and seminarian who were providing aid to protesters in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, to clear the way for Trump to take a photo op brandishing a Bible in front of the boarded-up church.

So Trump scored a hat-trick: He violated the people’s right peaceably to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances; he abridged the freedom of speech and the press; and he interfered with the nearby church and attacked its clergy, which provoked a blistering response from the Episcopal bishop.

That apparently was one boneheaded move too many for Jim Mattis, the former secretary of defense who previously had refused to criticize Trump. The retired Marine general finally blew his top, calling Trump “the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people…. Instead, he tries to divide us.” He asked Americans to “reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.”

Mattis continued: “When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside. We know that we are better than the abuse of executive authority that we witnessed in Lafayette Square.”

Taking their cue from Trump, police around the country pursued more aggressive techniques against protesters — shooting rubber bullets and tear gas at protesters, whether they were peaceful or not. In some cases they sprayed pepper irritants in the faces of protesters who were in custody, as well as journalists. Police driving vehicles into a crowed, and in a notorious case in Buffalo, N.Y., where police officers pushed a 75-year-old man and then blamed him for striking his head on the pavement, which caused bleeding from his ear, as the police marched past him.

The Committee to Protect Journalists also reported that more than 300 journalists were assaulted, arrested or otherwise prevented from doing their jobs during protests in 60 cities after Floyd’s death.

The tide of opinion turned against Trump and toward support for Black Lives Matter. A CNN/SSRS poll conducted June 2-5, in the wake of the battle of Lafayette Square, showed just 38% of Americans approved of the way he’s handling his job, down seven points since the previous month, while 57% disapproved. The poll also found 84% said the peaceful protests following the death of Floyd are justified. Americans now consider race relations as important a campaign issue as the economy and health care, according to the survey.

In some small towns, armed vigilantes., primarily white, came out to defend against what they feared were Antifa “invasions” that never happened, after the White House made a baseless claim that Antifa is a terrorist organization that would seek to capitalize on the disorder.

In fact, Antifa is little more than a broad-based movement that is opposed to fascism (the name stands for “anti-fascist”). There is considerably more evidence that right-wing groups, such as the Proud Boys and the Boogaloo Boys, who hope to start a race war, were seeking to capitalize on the disorder. Twitter removed an account that claimed to be Antifa, but actually was run by Identity Evropa, a white supremacist group, which claimed Antifa would “move into residential areas” and “white” neighborhoods, Twitter said.

Trump has favored giving police broad leeway in dealing with suspected criminals, telling police officers on Long Island, N.Y., in July 2017, “Please don’t be too nice” with people they arrest. The audience laughed.

The Obama Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division aggressively investigated complaints against police, which was seen by police unions as a “war on cops.” In 2016, Trump, and his perceived embrace of official impunity for law enforcement officers, got him endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police — the nation’s largest police union, with more than 330,000 members. Chuck Canterbury, national president of the union, said Trump “will make America safe again.” Many black members dissented.

Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, ended the Justice Department’s oversight of local police departments. Sessions declared that such investigations “undermine the respect for police officers and create an impression that the entire department is not doing their work consistent with fidelity to law and fairness.”

Trump’s current attorney general, William Barr, in December 2019 sounded more like a mob consigliere than a guarantor of justice when he warned communities that protest police abuses “might find themselves without the police protection they need.” Barr has maintained the “hands off the cops” approach that suits Trump.

Too many police appear to think they are occupying forces, and that certainly is how a lot of black and brown people see them. The body count of people killed by police tends to confirm those suspicions. Good cops need to embrace the need for reforms that make them fit the role of guardians instead of warriors and give minorities a reason to trust them.

Reforming police does not mean doing away with police. Police should be demilitarized and become more responsive to the communities they patrol.

State and local governments should be responsible for the lawful conduct of their police agencies, but they might need prompting from Congress, and House and Senate Democrats on June 8 unveiled a bill intended to start the overhaul. The Justice in Policing Act would limit legal protections for police who engage in misconduct “knowingly or with reckless disregard,” create a national database of excessive-force incidents, ban chokeholds, including the kind used by the police officer in the death of George Floyd, as well as no-knock warrants in drug cases, a tactic that led to the March death of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky., when police barged into the wrong house. The bill would also would make lynching a federal crime. But it would leave funding decisions to state and local governments, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi noted. That’s a good start. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2020

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