Adventures in American Lunacy: 6/1/20
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
Wait, no. Wrong dystopia.
It was a beautiful spring day in early June, and the country was on fire.
The United States had just surpassed 107,000 pandemic-related deaths. Unemployment claims surpassed 40 million and the real jobless rate was hovering at 24%. Protestors filled the streets of more than 30 American cities. The peaceful were beginning to be drowned out by the violent, as they always are. Twenty-nine states activated 70,000 National Guard troops — just in case.
Still fairly early in the day. President Trump just finished a phone call to Russian President Vladimir Putin and was now kicking off a conference call with America’s state governors.
“You have to dominate, if you don’t dominate you’re wasting your time,” the President said in a tone oddly reminiscent of an Italian mobster. “They’re going to run over you, you’re going to look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate. You’ve got to arrest people, you have to track people, you have to put them in jail for 10 years and you’ll never see this stuff again. You know when other country’s watch this, they’re watching this — the next day wow, they’re really a push over. And we can’t be a push over. And we have all the resources. It’s not like we don’t have the resources. So, I don’t know what you’re doing. It’s a movement, if you don’t put it down it will get worse and worse… The only time its successful is when you’re weak and most of you are weak.”
“It’s a movement.” A movement comprised of people. People among other flawed people with a few shitty people who like to exploit opportunities like movements mixed in. That’s a reason for the movement to be “put down;” squashed by the heavy boot of government. A government of the people.
The President continued: “We will activate Bill Barr and activate him very strongly. Washington [D.C.] was under very good control, but we’re going to have it under much more control. We’re going to pull in thousands of people.”
You can “activate” the Attorney General? Like he’s a weapon, or a tool of some kind? Just him or the entire Justice Department? What’s that look like?
AG Barr later directed the FBI to send riot teams to Miami and Washington.
Oh…
Also on the call were Defense Secretary Mark Esper and General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Esper echoed Trump, telling the governors in a discussion about American protesters in American cities that, “we need to dominate the battle space.”
Our streets and neighborhoods — the “battle space.”
Trump told the group of governors that he had put Milley in charge of managing the protests, but Milley is an advisor, not part of the military chain of command, so he can’t legally lead any military response. The White House Press Secretary later “clarified” that Milley would lead a “central command center in conjunction with the state and local governments.”
Audio of Trump’s conversation with the state governors immediately leaked.
Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a former Army captain who now sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, was on board with the President’s sentiments. He called for Trump to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act, which permits the president to override the restriction against using the military in domestic situations in extreme situations. Cotton tweeted:
“Anarchy, rioting, and looting needs to end tonight. If local law enforcement is overwhelmed and needs backup, let’s see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they’re facing off with the 101st Airborne Division. We need to have zero tolerance for this destruction…. And, if necessary, the 10th Mountain, 82nd Airborne, 1st Cav, 3rd Infantry — whatever it takes to restore order. No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.”
Nice list, Tom. A military man spitting the proper names of infantry divisions is like porn for Breitbart followers. But what’s up with suggesting the American military should kill American citizens? Sounds a little counterintuitive… Did you, a former military man and Harvard grad, forget that the concept of “no quarter” — that is, killing those who surrender in a battle — is a war crime? Even against an enemy nation with whom we are at war this doesn’t fly.
Trump tweeted that Cotton was “100% correct.”
Shit…
Florida Representative Matt Gaetz — the strange and obnoxious fratboy-like creature who once wore a gas mask on the floor of Congress to poke fun at the dangers of coronavirus — liked Cotton’s suggestion as much as Trump. He tweeted “Now that we clearly see Antifa as terrorists, can we hunt them down like we do in the Middle East?”
What the…
Twitter hid Gaetz’s tweet. Hid a tweet from a sitting U.S. congressman because it violated the platform’s terms by glorifying violence.
A sitting U.S. congressman.
It’s midday and we still don’t know who is behind the looting and violence, although a number of videos have shown white instigators. Police seized assault rifles from at least two people associated with a rightwing group called the “Boogaloo Bois,” and clearly some of the rioters are little more than opportunists. The political affiliation of those rioters is not clear, despite the statements of Trump and Attorney General Barr that they are “radical leftists” and Antifa.
A white supremacist group called Identity Evropa has begun deploying dozens of fake accounts on Twitter, including the handle @Antifa_US, using them to call for violence in majority white suburbs, in the name of the Black Lives Matter movement. Several conservative websites started reporting on these tweets, spreading the false narrative that Antifa and BLM “thugs” we’re coming for White America. People are getting nervous and uncomfortable in the burbs — they don’t support racism or police brutality, but protestors and riots in their own neighborhoods? Maybe force should be used…
Publicly, Trump hadn’t spoken about any of this — pandemic deaths passing 100k, unemployment nearing a quarter of the workforce, the riots — nothing. He had tweeted plenty, but only in angry fits. No questions from reporters to deal with that way; no expectation of decorum or substance. Later in the day a journalist asked a senior White House official what Trump was doing, the official responded: “He’s not handling anything, just typing a bunch of shit on Twitter.”
It’s late afternoon and it feels like the country is teetering on the brink. No state governors have yet asked for federal intervention, which is good — maybe necessary seeing how Trump made it crystal clear that states are responsible for handling their own shit, like pandemics and whatnot. But this must be different because the President is tweeting that he wants federal troops deployed in those same states now...
Declaring himself “your president of law and order,” President Trump breaks his silence from the Rose Garden, where he warns that if mayors and governors didn’t increase their troop presence, he would send in federal troops, announcing he was deploying “thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel and law enforcement officers” to stop the protests in Washington, D.C. and “to protect the rights of law-abiding Americans, including your Second Amendment rights.”
That Second Amendment part seemed a little forced, no? I mean, you had them at ‘heavily armed’ and ‘law-abiding.’ At least buy them dinner before dropping the Second Amendment in there like some Casanova.
As Trump spoke, a massive military police presence, including officers from the Customs and Border Protection, began clearing peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square with tear-gas, flash bang explosions, and rubber bullets.
The president continued on, reinforcing Cotton’s and Gaetz’s calls for violence by threatening to use the Insurrection Act and name-dropping Antifa. He concluded his remarks by saying “Now, I’m going to pay my respects to a very, very special place.” He then walked out of the White House and into Lafayette Square where protestors had just been gassed and pushed out. He walked with a swagger ahead of Esper, Attorney General William Barr, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and other White House officials, including Hope Hicks, who apparently hatched this choreographed made-for-TV moment to calm Trump’s anger at being made fun of for his recent stay in the White House bunker.
They crossed the park to St. John’s Episcopal Church, a historic site that had briefly been set on fire the prior night. There, Trump held up a Bible and said: “We have a great country, that’s my thoughts, the greatest country in the world. We will make it even greater, it won’t take long. It’s coming back strong and it will be greater than ever before.”
The President stood with his arm cocked at an acute angle, the Bible held awkwardly next to his face as he spoke. He never opened the book; didn’t mention it once…
The night came on, and the country was still on fire.
June 1, 2020.
-AN 🥃
