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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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WASHINGTON — After a weekend of protests that led all the way to his own front yard and forced him to briefly retreat to a bunker beneath the White House, President Trump arrived in the Oval Office on Monday agitated over the television images, annoyed that anyone would think he was hiding and eager for action.
He wanted to send the military into American cities, an idea that provoked a heated, voices-raised fight among his advisers. But by the end of the day, urged on by his daughter Ivanka Trump, he came up with a more personal way of demonstrating toughness — he would march across Lafayette Square to a church damaged by fire the night before.
The only problem: A plan developed earlier in the day to expand the security perimeter around the White House had not been carried out. When Attorney General William P. Barr strode out of the White House gates for a personal inspection early Monday evening, he discovered that protesters were still on the northern edge of the square. For the president to make it to St. John’s Church, they would have to be cleared out. Mr. Barr gave the order to disperse them.
What ensued was a burst of violence unlike any seen in the shadow of the White House in generations. As he prepared for his surprise march to the church, Mr. Trump first went before cameras in the Rose Garden to declare himself “your president of law and order” but also “an ally of all peaceful protesters,” even as peaceful protesters just a block away and clergy members on the church patio were routed by smoke and flash grenades and some form of chemical spray deployed by shield-bearing riot officers and mounted police.
This is an awful man, waving a book he hasn’t read, in front of a church he doesn’t attend, invoking laws he doesn’t understand, against fellow Americans he sees as enemies, wielding a military he dodged serving, to protect power he gained via accepting foreign interference...
...exploiting fear and anger he loves to stoke, after failing to address a pandemic he was warned about, and building it all on a bed of constant lies and childish inanity. This is not partisan. It is simply about recognizing the moral vacuum that is now pretending to lead.
...exploiting fear and anger he loves to stoke, after failing to address a pandemic he was warned about, and building it all on a bed of constant lies and childish inanity. This is not partisan. It is simply about recognizing the moral vacuum that is now pretending to lead.
In almost half a decade of stunts, provocations and demagoguery, one moment may come to define President Trump’s authoritarian turn. On Monday evening, security forces fired rubber bullets, flash-bang shells and chemical irritants to disperse a group of peaceful protesters massed outside the White House. The path cleared, Trump strode to nearby St. John’s Episcopal Church flanked by his allies, including the country’s top military official, and waved a Bible before cameras in a telegraphed photo op. Back at the Rose Garden, he had vowed to unleash military force against demonstrators massing across the country’s cities.
The optics of the move were dramatic enough, but the message was all the more ominous. “Everything [Trump] has said and done is to inflame violence,” the Episcopal bishop of Washington later told my colleagues. “We need moral leadership, and he’s done everything to divide us.”
Critics warn of the country teetering into genuine crisis under his watch. “We long ago lost sight of normal, but this was a singularly immoral act,” said Brendan Buck, a longtime former Hill aide who is now a Republican operative, to my colleagues. “The president used force against American citizens, not to protect property, but to soothe his own insecurities. We will all move on to the next outrage, but this was a true abuse of power and should not be forgotten.”
For the president, the tensions unleashed by the killing of George Floyd — an unarmed black man who was pinned at the neck by a Minneapolis police officer’s knee — are a political opportunity. Trump invoked scattered instances of looting to threaten armed retribution on an entire protest movement. He cast the continued unrest as evidence of the weakness of his Democratic opponents. And he proposed alarming emergency measures, including the criminalization of an inchoate, decentralized network of anarchist and anti-fascist groups as “terrorists.”
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