Even after he incited a historic insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th 2021, in which hundreds of police officers were viciously assaulted, the Vice President was threatened with hanging, the building was defaced and vandalized and the American flag was taken down and replaced with a Trump flag, one of Donald Trump’s first acts as president when he was inexplicably re-elected was to pardon every last one of the rioters, calling them patriots while condemning the police and the prosecutors.
As Axios reported at the time, Trump made the decision to do that very thoughtfully:
Eight days before the inauguration, Vice President-to-be JD Vance — channeling what he believed to be Trump’s thinking — said on “Fox News Sunday” that Jan. 6 convicts who assaulted police ought not get clemency: “If you committed violence that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”
Trump vacillated during an internal debate over targeted clemency vs. a blanket decision according to two insiders. But as Trump’s team wrestled with the issue, and planned a shock-and-awe batch of executive orders Day 1, “Trump just said: ‘F -k it: Release ’em all,'” an adviser familiar with the discussions said.
Just five months later, he has invoked an obscure law to federalize the California National Guard over the objection of the Governor and sent active duty Marines to the streets of Los Angeles in the wake of protests against his mass deportation policy. He histrionically declared on Truth Social that “a once great American City, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals […] now violent, insurrectionist mobs are swarming and attacking our Federal Agents to try and stop our deportation operations.” He later claimed that the city would have been “obliterated” had he not taken this action, telling reporters that that the protesters are “insurrectionists, they’re bad people” and they “should be in jail.”
He is full of it, as usual. Only a tiny part of downtown Los Angeles has been affected by protests and they have been much smaller than many. He simply wants to call it an insurrection as a way of projecting his traitorous performance on January 6th on to his political enemies. It’s hard to know how many people are buying it beyond his hard core followers but it doesn’t actually matter since the right wing bubble around him and the GOP is so hermetically sealed that they will just say it’s immensely popular and carry on with their plot to militarize the streets of America no matter what.
He’s out there every day now, bleating about “law and order” and defending the police as if he wasn’t personally responsible for one of the worst attacks on law enforcement in American history. He even has a pithy new slogan: “If they spit, we hit.”
Yes, it’s very disrespectful to spit in the faces of police officers. It’s also disrespectful to beat them over the head with flag poles but I guess that was different. He seems to be a bit obsessed with this spitting thing, mentioning it repeatedly. Aside from the obvious inappropriateness of ordering police to commit violence against someone who spits, it’s once again one of those tells that shows Trump has never evolved past the 70s and 80s.
The “spitting myth” was a staple on the right during the Vietnam era which has apparently stuck in Trump’s brain as things so often do and then he thinks he’s invented them. The trope was that vets coming home from the war were commonly spat upon by war protesters. As it happens that isn’t quite the truth. As historian Rick Perlstein noted from research for “Nixonland,” his epic history of the period:
In the now-classic study The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, sociologist Jerry Lembke established that the only actual documented examples of the frequently repeated canard that Americans spat upon returning Vietnam veterans came from the kind of World War II veterans who wouldn’t let their brothers back from Vietnam join local American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars posts because they were seen as shameful, as polluted. (The New York Times reported on the phenomenon here.)
They were the kind of veterans who — Gerald Nicosia tells the story in his history of Vietnam Veterans Against the War — greeted the antiwar veterans who had marched 86 miles from Morristown, New Jersey to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, just like George Washington’s army in 1877.
The World War II veterans heckled them: “Why don’t you go to Hanoi?” “We won our war, they didn’t, and from the looks of them, they couldn’t.” A Vietnam vet hobbled by on crutches. One of the old men wondered whether he had been “shot with marijuana or shot in battle.”
The “law and order” president who pardoned all those supporters who mercilessly beat up cops on January 6th is that same kind of guy. He loves the men in uniform as long as they toe the right wing line.
Trump appeared before a group of active duty soldiers at Ft. Bragg where he gave the most nakedly partisan political speech I’ve heard him give before a military audience. And sadly, those troops were a very eager and appreciative audience:
These are not the active duty troops being sent into Los Angeles. The National Guard and Marines are taking care of that. But MSNBC reported last night that the administration has plans to send tactical units to five Democratic run cities: New York City, Seattle, Chicago, Philadelphia and northern Virginia and I think we can be sure that if anyone dares to protest in any of those cities and towns he will federalize the National Guard and send in active duty military so who knows? Maybe some of those very enthusiastic Trump fans in uniform will be among them.
The plan is clearly to make Blue America buckle under to Donald Trump. He has already attacked law firms and universities and in the days before the latest affront to state sovereignty (previously a sacred shibboleth on the right) he had threatened to withdraw all federal support for California because of a high school trans athlete being allowed to compete. He will use any excuse to punish and dominate Americans who do not support him.
It’s hard to believe, I know, but it’s only been five months. He’s just getting started.
Salon
Gov. Newsom gave a fiery, on point speech last night. It’s well worth watching: