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Old 06-02-2020, 11:53 AM
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Post America Has No President

America Has No President
By: David A. Graham - The Atlantic - 06-01-20
Re: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...sident/612478/

Photo of the White House: https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/...3/original.jpg

Last night, as protests convulsed Washington, D.C., the White House went dark. All the lights were off. The windows of the president’s official residence were darkened, and the floodlights outside extinguished.

The country is sick, angry, and divided, but it also finds itself leaderless. Trump has never shown any inclination or ability to soothe or console in moments of crisis. He wants the trappings of power, like showing up for a rocket launch, but he doesn’t want to get his hands dirty with the work of governing. And he continues to view himself as the president only of the minority who voted for him, not all Americans. These tendencies have converged in this moment.

Yesterday, when America needed real leadership, the office of the president stood dark—and vacant.

It is not that Trump has been silent. Far from it: His Twitter feed has been a supercharged version of its normal self. Trump has attacked Joe Biden, slurred reporters, insulted leaders on the front lines of protests, and claimed federal authority he doesn’t have. This is the sort of behavior we’d call unhinged from any other president, but the word has lost any power through its endless, justified invocation throughout his tenure. In any case, the tweeting suggests a president flailing around for a message that sticks and for a sense of control.

What has been missing is any sort of behavior traditionally associated with the presidency. Trump initially condemned George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer, but since then there have been no statements intended to quell anger, bridge divisions, or heal wounds. There have been no public appearances, either; Trump traveled all the way to Florida to watch a SpaceX rocket launch on Saturday, but hasn’t managed to travel in front of cameras for a formal statement.

During a teleconference Monday, Trump derided governors as “weak” in their response to protests, but he has cowered out of view, dithering about what to do except for armchair-quarterbacking those who are trying. As my colleague Peter Nicholas notes, even Richard Nixon went to speak with anti–Vietnam War protesters in 1970, trying to convey that he heard their complaints. It’s hard to imagine Trump doing something like that, because he has shown no interest in being perceived as caring about what his critics believe.

As I noted in the closing days of the 2018 midterm race, the challenge of a democratic polity is that leaders must run on behalf of one party, then govern on behalf of everyone. In a one-party state, there’s no such divided polity, and that’s what Trump seems to prefer. His lack of interest in unifying Americans has been on display over the past few days.

Despite the vacuum that Trump’s silence creates, practically no one wants to hear from him. They know that he will only make the situation worse, whether by intention—“when the looting starts, the shooting starts”—or by clumsiness. People may yearn for a leader, but they don’t yearn for him.

“He should just stop talking. This is like Charlottesville all over again,” Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said on CNN last night, referring to Trump’s disastrous comments after a violent white-nationalist march in Virginia in 2017. “He speaks and he makes it worse. There are times when you should just be quiet, and I wish that he would just be quiet.”

It isn’t just Democratic leaders like Bottoms who are saying that. His own aides agree. They wish he’d stop tweeting, and while there are sporadic calls for Trump to make an Oval Office address, the prevailing view among his advisers—led by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner—is that such an address would be unwise. These staffers remember that Trump’s March Oval Office address on the coronavirus was full of errors and a political loser. Like Bottoms, they see a parallel with Charlottesville and worry that Trump will just make things worse.

They’re almost certainly right. Trump is unable to analyze any issue outside the lens of electoral politics—or, more precisely, his own political fortunes. When The New York Times asked Trump yesterday what he was going to do to address unrest, he replied, “I’m going to win the election easily … The economy is going to start to get good and then great, better than ever before. I’m getting more judges appointed by the week, including two Supreme Court justices, and I’ll have close to 300 judges by the end of the year.”

If Trump’s goal is to maximize his political advantage in this moment, he could demonstrate leadership in ways other than giving a speech. As Adam Nagourney points out, a well-timed appearance like Bill Clinton’s visit to riot-stricken Los Angeles in 1992 can help make a campaign. Some Trump aides are reportedly encouraging listening sessions, although no one who’s watched Trump in action can possibly imagine him earnestly listening and learning, or getting through such an exercise without a gaffe. (Biden, Trump’s presumptive Democratic opponent, has also been notably quiet, only cautiously venturing out of isolation in his house in Wilmington, Delaware, yesterday.)

Nothing in Trump’s statement to the Times touches the demonstrations or shows even a rudimentary understanding of what has inspired them. The paper reports that “aides repeatedly have tried to explain to him that the protests were not only about him, but about broader, systemic issues related to race.” Unsurprisingly, Trump, who has a long history of racist behavior and comments, has not warmed to that explanation. Instead, he has gravitated toward conspiracy theories. Yesterday, he tweeted that he would designate antifa—a familiar rhetorical target—as a terrorist organization, even though he has no federal authority to do so. He also blamed outside agitators for unrest, a claim debunked by his own allies at National Review. It seems true that there are some violent protesters trying to stir up trouble, but they are plainly neither the starting point nor the majority of the marchers.

In short, Trump has no plan to reach out to anyone who doesn’t already agree with him about antifa, he has no notions about how to pacify the protests, and he’s in denial about what is causing them.

He may also be in denial about his electoral prospects. The case that the protests help Trump is simple enough—voters see chaos and gravitate toward a strongman over a warm, fuzzy liberal. But it’s hard to run credibly as a law-and-order candidate when your four years in the presidency have seen repeated chaos, violence, and disorder, from Charlottesville to Pittsburgh, El Paso to Dayton, Parkland to Minneapolis. Nixon was able to use that playbook in 1968, but he was running as an outsider, not as the incumbent.

Nonetheless, the election was at the top of Trump’s mind on Monday morning. He delivered an incoherent anti-Biden message and tweeted triumphantly about a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, surely the first time a sitting president has boasted about a poll showing him trailing by 10 points. Another tweet was odder still:

That date is Election Day, of course. Trump presumably means it as a rallying cry for his supporters, but it is a reminder to those he doesn’t bother to represent, too—of their chance to fill the vacant office of the president.

About the writer(s): We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
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Old 06-02-2020, 12:06 PM
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Post With Trump We’ve Reached The ‘Mad Emperor’ Stage

With Trump We’ve Reached The ‘Mad Emperor’ Stage
By: Richard Wolffe in the Guardian & posted by 3 Quarks Daily - 06-02-20
Re: https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarks...ror-stage.html
& https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...ying-to-behold


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. 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.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is what's being reported all over the US.

Boats
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Boats

O Almighty Lord God, who neither slumberest nor sleepest; Protect and assist, we beseech thee, all those who at home or abroad, by land, by sea, or in the air, are serving this country, that they, being armed with thy defence, may be preserved evermore in all perils; and being filled with wisdom and girded with strength, may do their duty to thy honour and glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

"IN GOD WE TRUST"
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