Photo credit: Shealah Craighead
Pres. Donald J. Trump walks from the White House Monday, June 1, 2020, to St. John’s Episcopal Church, known as the church of Presidents, that was damaged by fire during demonstrations in nearby LaFayette Square the night before.
Remember when our greatest fear after Donald Trump’s election was that our profoundly ignorant president might accidentally lead us into nuclear war with a foreign adversary? We weren’t wrong to worry about unintended consequences in a dangerous world. But the greatest threat to America has always been what Trump would do to our nation on purpose.
That became clear last week when Trump declared war on America and announced his intention to unconstitutionally deploy the U.S. military to our streets to “dominate” tens of thousands of Americans protesting brutal, unequal police treatment of African Americans that doesn’t just threaten black lives, but continually takes them.
There’s hope in the massive, racially diverse resistance to Trump’s undemocratic actions as peaceful demonstrations continue to grow demanding police practices that protect the safety of all Americans. Many of our most prominent military leaders are now speaking out against Trump’s unconstitutional attempt to misuse the military to control Americans rather than protect them.
Turning Point?
A historic national turning point may have occurred last Monday in response to what a Washington Post headline described as the president’s “Walk Heard Round the World.” Trump had just ended his Rose Garden threat to use the military against Americans with a cryptic remark about visiting “a very, very special place.” What he didn’t reveal to the assembled crowd was his government had just violently assaulted a peaceful crowd of protesters outside the White House in Lafayette Square employing noxious gas, rubber bullets, pepper balls, horses and an advancing line of federal agents with battle shields and batons clearing a path for the president to cross the street.
Trump’s destination was St. John’s Episcopal Church, which had been damaged by a quickly extinguished basement fire the previous night. Trump wanted to use the church for a strange photo op, awkwardly holding a Bible above his head looking as if he had just looted the church. Actually, Trump was doing something far worse, attempting to use Christianity as a religious stage prop to suggest some moral purpose behind the violence just committed upon the protesters, which the president was now threatening nationwide.
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Michael Gerson, the evangelical Christian speechwriter for former President George W. Bush who is now an anti-Trump conservative Washington columnist, wrote Trump appeared to be proposing a new beatitude: “Blessed are the brutal, for they shall dominate the battlespace.”
That closing phrase was a quote from Trump’s Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who’d joined Trump’s telephone call earlier that day urging the nation’s governors to call out massive numbers of National Guard troops to “dominate the battlespace” in American cities and end public protests against police. Esper and Army Gen. Mark Milley, Trump’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff bizarrely dressed in combat battle fatigues, further embarrassed the U.S. military by posing in front of St. John’s Church with Trump and his partisan Atty. Gen. William Barr, who supports the legality of anything Trump wants to do.
Military Outraged
Outrage over Trump’s political exploitation of the nonpartisan U.S. military led to week-long series of public protests from high-ranking military leaders under both Republican and Democratic presidents. Among the most scathing denunciations of Trump’s unconstitutional plans to unleash U.S. military force against American citizens were from Trump’s first Defense Secretary four-star Marine Gen. Jim Mattis and Navy Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Presidents Bush and Barack Obama.
Trump and Barr have falsely claimed the enormous national protests against police treatment of African Americans are led by antifa, a small group of violent anarchists and other far-left radicals. Mark Bray, a historian who wrote “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” says: “The idea of antifa ‘masterminding’ what’s happening . . . if you know anything about the subject is ludicrous.” Antifa has no formal membership and only about five to fifteen supporters in any given city, he said. Anyone involved in protests where they show up remember their fondness for shattering glass in storefronts bearing corporate names like Starbucks or Bank of America.
There’s nothing radical about public outrage from millions of Americans after watching a black man die from a bored-looking police officer pressing his knee on the man’s neck for an agonizing eight minutes and 46 seconds. It’s a natural human response. If police ever treated whites in middle class neighborhoods the way they treat blacks in black neighborhoods, police brutality would have ended long ago.
Trump faces three crises of massive historic proportions — a deadly pandemic killing more than 110,000 Americans, massive depression-level unemployment and a long overdue, diverse, passionate, public demand that police stop killing African Americans with casual, routine, dehumanizing violence.
As usual, Trump has no clue how to use the presidency to benefit any Americans other than himself. So why not just end American democracy and station troops in the streets? Who knows? Senate Republicans and the Trump Supreme Court might even go for it.