Month: June 2020

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper is on shaky ground with the White House after saying Wednesday that he does not support using active duty troops to quell the large-scale protests across the United States triggered by the death of George Floyd and those forces should only be used in a law enforcement role as a last resort.Esper noted that “we are not in one of those situations now,” distancing himself from President Donald Trump’s recent threat to deploy the military to enforce order.

“The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act,” Esper said from the Pentagon podium.

Wednesday’s press briefing by Esper went over poorly at the White House, where he was already viewed to be on shaky ground, multiple people familiar with the matter said.

A senior Republican source told CNN that there has been ongoing tension involving Esper and that Trump has no respect for his defense chief. Esper has had little influence and essentially takes his lead from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the source said, adding that this latest press conference will undoubtedly make things worse.

Trump and other top officials, including national security adviser Robert O’Brien, are “not happy” with Esper after his Wednesday remarks, three people familiar with the White House’s thinking said.In the press conference, Esper also distanced himself from a maligned photo-op outside St. John’s Church. One White House official said aides there did not get a heads up about the content of Esper’s remarks, including most notably Esper’s decision to publicly break with the President on the use of the military to address unrest in US cities.

Esper’s comments Wednesday came after defense officials told CNN this week that there was deep and growing discomfort among some in the Pentagon even before Trump announced Monday that he is ready to deploy active duty forces if local leaders fail to ramp up enforcement efforts.
[…]

Esper and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have faced a flurry of questions and criticism in the wake of Trump’s comments, pressure that culminated in Esper’s appearance in the Pentagon briefing room Wednesday where he attempted to distance himself from the President’s rhetoric and clean up some of his own.

Asked about his use of the word “battlespace” when discussing quelling violence on the streets amid civil unrest, Esper attempted to explain that it was “something we use day in and day out … it’s part of our military lexicon that I grew up with … it’s not a phrase focused on people.””In retrospect I would have used different wording,” Esper said.
[…]

Sentiments inside the White House toward Esper had been gradually souring before this week’s episode, with both Trump and O’Brien viewing Esper as not entirely committed to the President’s vision for the military.

One person suggested the White House was reluctant to fire Esper given the current crisis and the fact that there are only five months left before the election. Another person suggested Trump could leave Esper in place and push blame his way. The President has a history of letting top officials languish in positions long after he’s lost confidence in them.For months, the President and O’Brien have been losing faith in Esper’s ability to lead the military and his tendency to avoid offering a full-throated defense of the President or his policies, according to multiple administration officials.

O’Brien, in particular, has spoken to the President about Esper’s television remarks, which the White House has viewed on repeated occasions as problematic or off-message. On at least one occasion, O’Brien presented the President with print-outs that compare his own public remarks on a topic to those of Esper to highlight the contrast.

Trump has privately expressed frustrations with Esper in recent weeks, which aides believe would likely be accelerated by his comments about the ongoing nationwide protests. He vented about Esper at length during a recent weekend at Camp David, according to multiple sources.

Those complaints have raised questions about Esper’s future at the Pentagon should Trump win a second term, but his comments from the Pentagon briefing room Wednesday have prompted speculation that the timing of his departure could be moved up, the source said.”I think this is the end for him,” they added.

A US official close to Esper and familiar with White House thinking said the secretary is being “skewered” by those inside the White House for coming out Wednesday to express his views.”(I’m) not sure who thought that was a good idea,” another official told CNN.

This is the real problem:

In December, Esper sat for an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier at the Ronald Reagan Defense Forum and when asked what it was like to work for Trump, he responded, “he is just another one of many bosses I’ve had and you’ve had your time that you learn to work with.” The remark irritated the President, who tends to expect lavish praise from his Cabinet, according to two administration officials.

And O’Brien turns out to be a gossipy, back-biting little twit, which explains why Trump loves him so much:

O’Brien, by contrast, almost never breaks with the President in his public remarks. O’Brien, who took over as national security adviser last September, is said by multiple administration officials to have expressed some level of interest in the job of either secretary of state or secretary of defense, should either of those positions become available.

On Tuesday, White House officials scratched their head at an interview Esper gave to NBC News claiming he did not know he was walking to St. John’s church on Monday with the President. Officials said the plans were clear inside the West Wing and that Esper’s explanations made little sense. Esper clarified on Wednesday that while he knew they were going to the church, he did not know the movement would turn into a photo opportunity.
[…]

But while Esper attempted to clarify his view on using active duty troops to rein in protesters Wednesday, Milley was notably absent during the press briefing.

Milley had nothing to say about any of it, letting Esper take the heat saying that he thinks the civilian leadership be the ones making statements. But he put on his battle fatigues for Trump and strutted around DC on Monday night like a good boy.

Trump has already polluted the Navy by pardoning the Navy Seals, prompting one Navy Secretary to quit in disgust. His replacement, you’ll recall spent hundreds of thousands of dollar to give a speech on the USS Roosevelt condemning their skipper for trying to save their lives in the Coronavirus crisis, also resulting in his resignation. Now the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has allowed himself to be tarnished as well.

Esper is a dim cipher. But he somehow recognizes that his reputation is in danger ouf being permanently stained, possibly resulting in him being unable to secure the big bucks when he leaves. But it’s too late. Everything Trump touches dies and he’s now a dead man walking.

Update: Oops.

We’ve lost track of the COVID crisis what with the police killing crisis.

But in case you were wondering here are the latest numbers that Mr Google provided. And from what I gather a lot of places are seeing spikes in cases although I don’t know if that reflects more testing.

It’s still with us.

The economic catastrophe is with us as well:

And, of course:

Meanwhile:

https://twitter.com/GadiNBC/status/1267945648705298433?s=20

This is happening all over the country.

Americans have been protesting the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police for days on end in dozens of cities throughout the United States.While tensions between police and demonstrators have heated up in many places, some officers have shown solidarity with the movement by hugging protesters, praying with them, mourning with them, and taking a knee to honor Floyd.

It won’t solve the problem by itself. But it is something.

There are dozens of youtubes of these moments. It’s something I’ve never seen before. It’s symbolism. But it’s important symbolism.

It’s certainly more than anything our national leadership has done.

They did this in Washington DC as well, probably elsewhere too. They really don’t want people to be able to deal with the pain of tear gas in their eyes. It is punishment for dissent as much as a tactic to disperse large groups.

I was reminded of this piece I wrote from years ago:

Yes of course pepper spray is a torture device

In 1997, environmentalists were staging a sit-in against the cutting of old forest in Humboldt county. The police sprayed pepper spray directly into the protesters eyes in similar fashion to what happened in UC yesterday and then used liquified pepper spray and applied it directly to the protesters eyes with q-tips. I’m not kidding. There’s video. [unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to exist online anymore]

I was writing about the use of tasers when I wrote this piece back in 2009:

Why is it that the taser videos always show a bunch of cops sauntering around, three or four of them bent over a prone person in handcuffs, blithely administering the taser as if they are merely wiping a speck of dust off the suspects shirt? I think that’s the part I find so chilling — it’s so methodical, so cold, so completely inhuman — that it seems like something out of a dystopian sci-fi novel featuring robots or aliens.

I’ll never forget the horror of seeing the video of those environmental protesters having their eyes calmly swabbed with Q tips soaked in liquid pepper spray, by the Humboldt County sheriffs dept. In searching for the video I came across this San Francisco Examiner editorial from 1997, that could be written today about tasers:

Justifying Torture

Law enforcement arguments in a federal lawsuit are malarkey – pepper spray used senselessly hurts cops as much as protesters

San Francisco Examiner
Monday, Nov. 17, 1997 Page A 18

It’s almost farcical for law enforcement officials to continue defending pepper spray as a weapon to get protesters to follow orders. A videotape of officers applying pepper spray in liquid form to demonstrators’ eyes shows the technique to be a form of torture.

Yet, attorneys for the Humboldt County Sheriff and the Eureka Police Department argue in federal court that this use of pepper spray is legitimate and unobjectionable. In court papers filed in a protesters’ suit against the cops, police training expert Joseph J. Callahan Jr. says, implausibly, that the videotape could be used as a training film “illustrating modern police practices delivered in a calm, deliberate manner.” (Remind us not to volunteer as guinea pigs for Mr. Callahan.)

The videotape was shot by Humboldt sheriff’s deputies at an Oct. 16 demonstration, against logging in the Headwaters Forest, that took place in the Eureka office of Rep. Frank Riggs, R-Windsor. Four women who had chained themselves together with heavy metal “black bears” got liquid pepper spray rubbed into their eyes with cotton swabs, and one woman who refused even then to move had the pepper mist sprayed into her face.

This hurts, as the videotaped reactions make clear. But it broke up the demonstration pronto, and that’s what counted for the law enforcers.

“At stake,” attorneys for the cops argue, “is whether professionally trained police officers are to be deprived of the use of pepper spray, a substance carried by millions of private citizens in this country.”

But this is really not the issue. Most people don’t object to police using pepper spray the way it’s designed to be used: To subdue a suspect who threatens officers or threatens to flee. Neither occurred in the case of the Eureka protesters.

Police shouldn’t use pepper spray, or any other weapon, to dish out punishment to suspects. Just because cops are in a hurry doesn’t make it OK for them to take shortcuts, or inflict pain to get things done.

The argument doesn’t wash that no lasting damage was done by the pepper spray. By the same logic, police could use branding irons, sharp knives or psychological abuse on recalcitrant protesters as long as “no lasting damage was done.”

Other police legal arguments are similarly shallow. An attorney for the cops said the use of heavy metal sleeves linked with chains that made protesters virtually immovable amounted to “active resistance,” justifying the use of pepper spray.

In the past, police used metal grinders to cut through the heavy metal in order to oust demonstrators. That takes longer and is inconvenient, but it doesn’t violate anyone’s civil rights or threaten their physical well-being.

No one wants to live in a society where police are free to do whatever they wish in order to punish suspected law breakers. Cruel and unusual punishment is outlawed by the Constitution. And anyway, punishment is up to the courts to determine and the penal system to administer.

What cops risk through indiscriminate use of pepper spray, and its indiscriminate defense in court, is losing it altogether. If police are too dense to distinguish between legitimate use and torture, the Legislature should eliminate any confusion and outlaw pepper spray, period.

That holds true for all weapons that can be used for torture.

It took three tries and eight years, but the protesters finally won their case against the police in federal court. They were awarded a dollar.

This article called “Pepper Spray, Pain and Justice” from the Civil Liberties Monitoring Project in northern California on the use of pepper stray as a torture device gives all the details of this famous case. It has informed my thinking about tasers and other uses of “pain compliance” and its implications for a free society. It’s not long and I urge you to read it all if this situation alarms you.

It tells the harrowing story that you see in that video up top, including the chilling statement by the police after they were done pepper spraying one of the girls directly in the face: “We’re not torturing you anymore.”

It asks the question:

Are these valid tactics for the DA’s office to use? May the Sheriff and the DA single out forest activists for “special treatment” when they are arrested and charged? The argument for this would be that the protests are costly to the county, and in an effort to contain those costs by reducing the number of protesters, or to prevent nonviolent civil disobedience which is expensive to the government, the government may use its discretionary powers to make the experience these activists have with the criminal justice system as unpleasant and costly as possible. The use of pepper spray to torment activists who are nonviolently sitting-in can be seen as the latest and most extreme step in this campaign.

The difficulty with this approach is that it puts the Sheriff and the DA into the position of the judge. It metes out punishment — pain, days in jail, costly trips to court, disruption of normal life — without the bother of proving guilt. Did the Queen in Alice in Wonderland say, “First the sentence, then the trial”? Even children can see that this is backwards.

One would think so. At the time this was written, they assumed the case would be decided in 1998. As I wrote, it was finally decided in 2009. But a jury found for the activists.

Of course it’s torture. It couldn’t be more obvious. The question we have to ask ourselves if our society believes torturing of political dissidents is acceptable.

He has always been an absolute disaster. Here is an interview with Barr from an oral history of the 1992 LA riots. It sounds familiar. Gangs then, Antifa now.

He’s always been a wingnut loon:

William P. Barr
Attorney general

The state verdict came down on the cops. I was out in a press conference within a few minutes of it…. I went down to the press room and said, “There’s still a pending Federal investigation. This isn’t the end of the process. The Federal government will still continue to review this, blah, blah, blah. But we’re not going to tolerate any of this stuff out in the streets.”

Then [President Bush] called and wanted to know what we were up to and make sure we got a statement out. I said we’d just gotten a statement out. Then he said he wanted me to come by. I guess actually, later, as things got worse in California, he said he wanted me to come by the next morning at six or some ungodly hour. Overnight I had prepared this plan to use 2,000 or more Federal officers to supplement what was out there, basically to enforce the law out there. A lot of people think that the Department of Justice can just click its fingers and get a lot of resources, but the fact of the matter is it’s very difficult. We had only 150 marshals available as part of their special operations group. We put together an amazing polyglot organization of FBI, SWAT [Special Weapons and Tactics] teams, U.S. marshal SWAT teams, Border Patrol special operations group, a prison special operations group, and things like that. Even the Park Police put in their SWAT team.

We scraped together 2,000 people and told them to stand by at different airports and rally early that morning, because I figured the President might want something done. I showed up at the meeting. I had to go with [FBI Director William] Sessions.

The President wanted to know what the violence was about, and I told him that there were a lot of street gangs involved and this was primarily centered on street gang activity. I told him the names of the gangs that were involved, that the violence was largely street gang activity, big-time gang, not like street gangs in the 1950s—Crips-type gangs.

I explained that the L.A. police force is a very small police force—it’s highly mobile, but it’s very small. I said, “The National Guard is all screwed up, and they’re having trouble getting the National Guard there. We have two other choices. You can get as many civil guys out there as you can, and I have 2,000 who can move, but I would need air support from—” [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin] Powell was sitting there. I said, “I need Colin’s help in getting them out there, but I could get you 2,000 people out there by three or four in the afternoon, assuming the military transports were available.”

I said, “The only other alternative would be regular Army.” We had just gone through an exercise two years earlier in St. Croix, so I was very familiar with how to use regular Army in a domestic situation. I understood all the code sections and what you had to do…. Basically the President has to issue a proclamation telling people to cease and desist and go to their homes. It’s sort of an antiquated statute. And then if they don’t cease and desist, you’re allowed to use regular Army.

…I said we can get everything ready to use Federal troops, but that was really the only other alternative. And Colin Powell said what troops were available, what bases, and so forth.

So he said, “Go ahead. Let’s launch those civilian guys. Let’s not try to resort to regular military right now.” I said, “Okay, who should I have [Deputy Attorney General] George Terwilliger talk to?” Powell gave me a name. And in an hour, they had transports starting off on the East Coast flying across the country, landing at Birmingham, Alabama, picking up the FBI agents there, landing in the next city, basically hopscotching across the country. Then they had Air Force buses waiting at the Air Base busing these guys in. So we did get everybody out there at the time I said.

I was hanging around the Oval Office at that point, and the president was on the phone to the governor. He was on the phone to the mayor, getting reports, asking, “Where’s the National Guard? When can you get the National Guard up there?” Very much engaged.

While I was there, he probably talked three or four times to the governor and one of the members of the Cabinet who was out there in California at the time. He talked to him. He was very engaged. He talked to some civil rights leaders who were calling in, and he was very much in command. Then he made the decision toward the end of the day that more power would be needed, and so we implemented the plan of using Federal forces. That was an interesting episode.

Q: Did he go out there?

Barr: No, but he went later.

…

Q: Was President Bush shocked by this dramatic event in Los Angeles? Did it have an effect on him? Did he see it as an indicator of something wrong that had to be fixed in America?

Barr: I can’t tell the extent to which he was shocked. He seemed surprised and wondered what was going on, what was this all about, and why the violence, that ugly violence. He asked me. Some people would probably disagree with what I told him, but I did lay a lot of it on gang activity.

Q: And you had a program to try and deal with that kind of thing.

Barr: Yes.

Q: But that didn’t galvanize.

Barr: Well, no one stopped me. We did make a lot of progress against gangs. But he wasn’t as comfortable in that policy area, I guess. My basic take was that this was not civil unrest or the product of some festering injustice. This was gang activity, basically opportunistic. I don’t know why he wasn’t more interested in these issues.

[President Bush] turns to Brent and he says, ‘Brent…how do I federalize the National Guard?’ Brent says, ‘I’m not sure I know either, Mr. President. I probably need to call Colin [Powell].’ I can’t believe this. So he gets Colin Powell on the phone and he’s going ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, okay.’ Colin says, ‘All you’ve got to do is say it.’

Almost every postwar president has faced domestic crisis. None of them have deliberately inflamed it — until now

For all of Donald Trump’s alleged branding genius, he never seems to come up with anything original. In business he just slapped his name on any consumer item that would pay him a couple of dollars for the privilege. In politics he’s stolen his slogans from previous presidents. His most famous, “Make America Great Again,” was Ronald Reagan’s campaign slogan in 1980. And he seems to be under the impression that these two, which he’s used intermittently before but is rolling out again, are Trump originals. They are actually patented Richard Nixon lines:

On some subconscious level these phrases connect with ideas Trump has heard before, but his narcissism requires that he convince himself he actually thought of them. If only he had a real grasp of history and the same level of competence as even the worst and stupidest of his predecessors, the country might not be in the situation it is in today. His handling of this latest crisis makes all of them look like geniuses by comparison.

After spending the weekend holed up in the White House watching TV and tweeting nonsense, Trump heard that people were saying he was cowardly for reacting to the protests in Washington by rushing down to the White House bunker and turning off the lights, like an old guy avoiding trick-or-treaters on Halloween night. He became upset and worried that would affect his re-election campaign so he projected his own shortcomings by getting the state governors on the phone so he could yell at them, calling them “weak” and insisting they must “dominate” their citizens. He showed them who’s boss by threatening to unleash hell by deploying the military on anyone who didn’t “get control” of the protests.

Apparently, this made him feel better because he then gathered his advisers together to decide how to calm the unrest by further demonstrating his heroic manliness to the world. According to various reports, either he or his daughter Ivanka came up with the crackerjack idea of giving a Rose Garden statement and then walking to the boarded-up church across the street to pose for a picture holding a Bible.

Apparently, the fearless leader didn’t want to walk near any of the protesters who were gathered in the park nearby so Attorney General Bill Barr, apparently under the impression that he directly commands federal police forces, ordered the gathered troops in Robocop uniforms to disperse the protesters so Trump could have his photo shoot. We all saw what happened as they aggressively drove groups of nonviolent protesters away, deploying smoke bombs and pepper balls, and knocking down anyone who stood in their way, including members of the press.

Trump gave his speech, threatening that if the states didn’t call in the National Guard and quell disorder he would unilaterally invoke the Insurrection Act — a law that has rarely been used, and never for this purpose — to send in the military. Flanked by the secretary of defense, the attorney general, his national security staff and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs (unaccountably dressed in full battle fatigues) he lumbered over to St. John’s Episcopal Church to get his picture.

It was a PR disaster of epic proportions.

The New York Times declared that “when the history of the Trump presidency is written, the clash at Lafayette Square may be remembered as one of its defining moments,” an act of unprovoked violence against peaceful protesters for the purpose of “a ham-handed photo opportunity.”

On Tuesday, Trump returned to tweeting the usual babbling nonsense, claiming that “My Admin has done more for the Black Community than any President since Abraham Lincoln” and complaining that “Democrat”-run cities were conspiring with Antifa protesters (or whomever) to hurt his re-election chances.

American presidents have often had to deal with protests and civil unrest. It is part of our political culture and the right to express your grievances in public is guaranteed by the Constitution. You’d have to go back quite a way to find a president unilaterally using the military to quell an uprising:

That operation, led by Trump’s favorite general, Douglas MacArthur, included future president Dwight Eisenhower.

As president, Eisenhower too used military troops for a domestic purpose when he sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. That was to protect the rights of nine African American students who were being blocked from attending a previously all-white high school, in direct defiance of a U.S. Supreme Court decision. It’s hard to think of a reason for doing so that has less in common with Trump’s threats and demands for “dominance.”

In the following years, there was massive social unrest with large antiwar protests and demonstrations for civil rights. President Lyndon B. Johnson responded to the massive peaceful civil disobedience and protests led by the Rev. Martin Luther King with a commitment to passage of civil rights legislation. Bill Moyers, who was White House press secretary at the time, has said many times that LBJ told King in their private meeting that the threat of civil disorder was necessary to provoke action from Congress.

When the war in Vietnam likewise brought people into the streets, and the “long hot summer” of 1967 followed by the King assassination in 1968 led to the largest wave of urban “rioting” before this week’s protests, Johnson was forced to announce he would not run for another term in the 1968 election.

As I mentioned, Richard Nixon then successfully deployed the slogans “Law and order” and “the silent majority.” But as historian Rick Perlstein points out in Mother Jones, those slogans didn’t help Republicans in the 1970 midterm elections. Voters tend to hold incumbents responsible for whatever social unrest happens on their watch, and Nixon owned plenty of it by that time. Someone might want to give Trump a word to the wise.

George H.W. Bush had the “Rodney King riots” of 1992. Bill Clinton dealt with a wave of right-wing violence. George W. Bush had 9/11 and the massive Iraq war demonstrations. Barack Obama tried with grace and dignity to heal a country torn apart by horrific mass shootings and worsening racial violence.

Those presidents may have dealt with those crises well or poorly. None of them was perfect. But none responded by whining publicly that it was all a conspiracy to damage them politically. Right or wrong, none of them used the crisis as an excuse to stage a photo-op for a campaign ad.

Trump only knows how to put on a show, and that’s all he is doing. But it’s a dangerous show. He is inciting his own voters with this loose talk about “domination,” and deliberately creating an environment that could lead to disaster if someone, somewhere, makes a tragic mistake. Real leaders try to calm the waters in these situations in order to reduce that risk. He is doing the opposite.

You can see people around the country trying to do the right thing in spite of Trump’s counterproductive aggression. Police around the country, at least in some instances, are taking a knee and joining protests, seeking to reduce the tension. People on both sides are trying to talk to each other. There is a way forward if everyone can find some common ground.

But don’t expect this president to lead the way. Trump doing something like that is as likely as him inviting Colin Kaepernick and Barack Obama to the White House and the three of them taking a knee in the Rose Garden. That photo-op might just mean something. But Donald Trump is much too weak to do anything that strong.

My Salon column reprinted with permission

“There’s something happening here,” Stephen Stills sang to an eerie guitar riff. Seen as an antiwar anthem, “For What It’s Worth” arose from long-haired, young people on Sunset Strip protesting a curfew in late 1966. Business owners grew annoyed that crowds of hippies gathering there at night were bad for business. The “Sunset Strip riots” blocked traffic and closed some clubs.

Stills told an interviewer in 1971, “A bunch of kids got together on a street corner and said we aren’t moving. About three busloads of Los Angeles police showed up, who looked very much like storm troopers. … And I looked at it and said, ‘Jesus, America is in great danger.’”

Half a century later, America is still in great danger. There’s still a man with a gun telling people young and old, black and white, they’ve got to beware. One of them is president of the United States.

The “Lafayette Park Photo-op Massacre,” as we might call it, happened because Donald Trump thinks what’s happening there is all about him. An outside White House adviser told Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman that Trump is angry because the protests are hurting his reelection chances.

“He feels the blue-state governors are letting it burn because it hurts him. It’s a lot like how he sees coronavirus.”

Trump may be angry about the protests, burning and looting because it’s “the Archie Bunker in him,” sure. But the attention junkie in him is angry because nationwide protests take the media spotlight off him. He went from daily coverage of his coronavirus task force soliloquies to being a news-cycle footnote. Reports that he spent time hiding out last weekend in a West Wing bunker were worse than lowered ratings. They made him look weak. Something had to be done to get back his mojo. Then came the Lafayette Park Photo-op Massacre and Trumpish threats to unleash the U.S. military on American civilians.

Not even Trump’s coalition of the quisling want to own that:

What Trump doesn’t get and what America woke up to is that he’s irrelevant here. It’s not about him. What makes these protests different from others of the Trump period is an America wearied by stagnant wages, personal debt, financial meltdowns, and 100,000-plus, disproportionately black and brown COVID-19 deaths finally has had enough. Maybe. The killing of George Floyd and the unjustness and persistence of systemic racism is not new. What is different is Americans are angry enough, broke enough, and tired-of-it-all enough to take to the streets to protest not just Trump or police brutality but the whole stinking mess.

“The brokenness is centuries in the making,” Dahlia Lithwick writes at Slate. The anti-Trump signs and balloons are missing. Maybe this time is different:

Donald Trump didn’t create the problems of racialized policing or overincarceration or grotesque inequality or a media ecosystem that forgot to cover Joe Biden this weekend because #ratings. But he has benefited and profited and profiteered from all of it, each and every day, to the point that he now finds himself in the unique position of being in charge of it now. Perhaps it is just subconscious, but he might even realize that those exact things are being protested—these underlying life-and-death truths about life in America, and by that I do mean this nation’s foundation upon white supremacy—that made it possible for Donald Trump to become president in the first place. And he might be most threatened when the target is not him specifically, but the very world that makes him possible.

In a speech in Philadelphia Tuesday, former Vice President Joe Biden called for finally confronting and remediating America’s original sin.

“The moment has come for our nation to deal with systemic racism,” Biden said. “To deal with the growing economic inequality in our nation. And to deal with the denial of the promise of this nation — to so many.”

“We are in a battle for the soul of this nation,” he said.” Who we are. What we believe. And maybe most important — who we want to be.”

The problem at hand is quite a few of our neighbors believe America is a zero-sum proposition. For all of us to do better means making us more equal. Some at the top of the social ladder will do less well in terms of money and/or in cultural clout. Team Trump isn’t having that. They like the balance of power just as it is, with their God in heaven and everyone knowing his/her place.

They are willing to reduce this country to a third-world dictatorship to preserve that system. The rest of us have had enough of it.

Update: A nod to Arlo Guthrie in the title.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

Gabe Sherman in Vanity Fair:

Confronting a failed presidency after 100,000-plus COVID deaths and the protests that are still convulsing the nation this week, Donald Trump is venting to West Wing officials that Democratic governors are allowing civil unrest to rage in American cities to damage his reelection campaign. “He feels the blue-state governors are letting it burn because it hurts him. It’s a lot like how he sees coronavirus,” an outside White House adviser told me yesterday, shortly after audio leaked of Trump berating governors on a conference call about quelling the riots.

Trump’s sense of victimhood, and his view that the crisis ignited by George Floyd’s gruesome death is largely a political problem, have resulted in a shambolic White House response, veering from Trump’s retreat to the bunker as the protests neared the White House to the culmination of police using teargas on peaceful protestors so that he could walk through a park to stage a photo op in front of St. John’s Church. “He’s paralyzed,” a former West Wing official told me.

In private, Trump has told people the street violence would subside if the other three Minnesota police officers were charged with murder, a person who spoke with Trump told me. But, always worried about seeming weak, he made no mention of the officers or police brutality during yesterday’s Rose Garden speech. “When things get dicey and hairy, it usually means he relies on his instincts,” a former West Wing official said. “And he’s decided law and order is going to win the day.”

Trump was already struggling to reboot his campaign when the gruesome Memorial Day video leaked, showing officer Derek Chauvin driving his knee into George Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes as Floyd pleaded for his life. A day after Floyd’s death, Trump promoted two operatives into senior campaign roles, moves that were largely seen as a demotion for Trump’s embattled campaign manager, Brad Parscale. As protests and riots intensified last week, Karl Rove visited the White House to offer advice on appealing to African American voters, a source briefed on the conversation said. Rove’s new role as an unofficial adviser on Trump’s team rankled some in the West Wing and on the campaign. “People aren’t happy about Rove. He’s a Bushie,” the source said. “What’s he going to tell Trump? He’s stale.”

Trump at first seemed to ignore the protests. He didn’t mention Floyd’s name for two days. But by Friday, Trump grasped the scale of the crisis when Secret Service agents rushed him into the White House bunker as hundreds of protesters demonstrated outside the White House gates. “The agents came in and weren’t messing around. It was serious,” Trump later told a friend. “Those guys aren’t going to take any shit.” That night Trump sent out an incendiary tweet threatening that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” and another on Saturday about “vicious dogs.” “Trump is pissed that they’re rioting. That’s just the old guy from Queens who’s offended by this. That’s the Archie Bunker in him,” a Trump friend told me.

Around Trump in the West Wing was a fierce debate over how to respond. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, opposed chief of staff Mark Meadows’s advice that Trump needed to give an Oval Office address to unify the country. “Meadows was close friends with Elijah Cummings. He wanted a different approach,” a former West Wing official said. Kushner argued that Trump hasn’t been successful when he’s spoken from the Oval Office in the past, a source briefed on Kushner’s thinking told me, an assessment Trump didn’t disagree with. “Trump doesn’t like giving Oval Office addresses,” a prominent Republican told me.

Meadows has only been on the job for two months, but already he has told people he is frustrated that Kushner usurps him, sources said. “Mark has told people, ‘I thought I was going to be the engineer, but I’m really just a ticket taker,’” a person close to Meadows told me. Ben Williamson, a senior Meadows adviser, denies he made the remark. According to sources, Kushner didn’t tell Meadows that Trump was promoting Bill Stepien to deputy campaign manager before it was announced last Tuesday. “Meadows had no idea about Stepien,” a source said. Williamson denies this.

With Trump escalating tensions with protesters, Republicans fear what comes next. “It’s spiraling out of control,” one person close to Mitch McConnell told me. “Everything went out the door yesterday,” a former West Wing official said. Trump, though, is now telling people he’s winning. “He thinks [Joe] Biden not condemning rioters will be Biden’s biggest mistake in appealing to suburban voters,” a Republican close to the White House said. “This has opened up new narratives in the campaign.”

He’s whining and crying that the protests are being manipulated by Democrats to make him look bad. He is an idiot. But the protests are about him — and all the other white supremacists who’ve perpetuated this racist system forever.

I have no doubt that he will try to appeal to white suburban voters with his racist rhetoric. Some wil no doubt agree with him. But whining and pulling stunts like his ridiculous photo-op yesterday aren’t going to help.

I don’t know what will happen, no one does. But there is a lot of water under the bridge with Trump at this point. Three and a half years of chaos and dysfunction have left him with no credibility and he has shown absolutely no ability to meet any crisis, including this one.

The Archbishop of Washington put it a little bit more politely but that’s pretty much what he said:

President Trump paid a visit on Tuesday to the St. John Paul II National Shrine, a Catholic religious site in northeast Washington. But just before he arrived, the archbishop of Washington made it starkly clear that the visit was not a welcome one.

“I find it baffling and reprehensible that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated in a fashion that violates our religious principles, which call us to defend the rights of all people, even those with whom we might disagree,” Archbishop Wilton Gregory, the first African-American to hold the post, wrote in a statement.

This was almost certainly a Bill Barr/Pat Cippolone special. They’re bot affiliated with the right wing group Opus Dei, although Barr claims not to be a formal member.

Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times

He ordered the clearing of the protesters yesterday. And apparently, they all saluted smartly and followed those orders, pretty much on the spot.

Attorney General William P. Barr personally ordered law enforcement officials on the ground to clear the streets around Lafayette Square just before President Trump spoke Monday, a Justice Department official said, a directive that prompted a show of aggression against a crowd of largely peaceful protesters, drawing widespread condemnation.

Officers from the U.S. Park Police and other agencies used smoke canisters, riot shields, batons and officers on horseback to shove and chase people gathered to protest the death of George Floyd. At one point, a line of police rushed a group of protesters standing on H Street NW, many of whom were standing still with their hands up, forcing them to race away, coughing from smoke. Some were struck by rubber bullets.

Secret Service officers then surrounded the area and created a protective zone for President Trump, who moments later crossed the street and made an appearance outside St. John’s Church.AD

On Tuesday, however, federal officials offered conflicting reasons for the forcible removal of the protesters, seeking to separate the move from Trump’s visit to the church.

The White House asserted that the crowd was dispersed to help enforce the city’s 7 p.m. curfew. Meanwhile, two federal law enforcement officials said the decision had been made late Sunday or early Monday to extend the perimeter around Lafayette Square by one block.

The plan was to be executed, according to the Justice Department official, the following afternoon. Barr was a part of the decision-making process, said the official, who was not authorized to comment ahead of Barr addressing the matter himself publicly and who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The Justice Department official said that in the afternoon, Barr went to survey the scene and found the perimeter had not been extended. The attorney general conferred with law enforcement officials on the ground.

“He conferred with them to check on the status and basically said: ‘This needs to be done. Get it done,’ ” the Justice Department official said.

Police soon moved on the protesters.

Does the Attorney General have the authority to order military police and Secret Service to do anything? Because that’s who I saw pushing against those protesters yesterday.

Remember: this was for a fucking photo-op for Trump to walk outside and prove his hands are extra-large and then brandish a Bible like Elmer Gantry.