The good news is, the awareness of the prevalence of police brutality in these United States has reached such a point that even Donald Trump feels compelled to express sympathy for its victims. The bad news is, everything else.
Unsurprisingly, El Trumpo stayed on message for approximately two seconds, before veering off to denounce, you know, liberals, and to warn folks that the White House is stocked with the “most vicious dogs” and the “most ominous weapons I have ever seen.” Nothing but class, our president.
Unfortunately, of course, as is so often the case, demonstrations to protest police violence against blacks “leads to” violence because there are too often people in these demonstrations who want violence, who want arson and looting, and so those who fear black violence already are simply confirmed in their prejudices, while local property owners see their businesses destroyed. And, of course, we get vast, unneeded helpings of pontification excusing and justifying and, frequently, glorifying violence that is both corrupt and corrupting by people who get paid to spout nonsense.
Prior to all this, of course, Trump was engaging in wild, Trumpian twitter tirades of such virulence and stupidity as to alienate the toadies at the Wall Street Journal and the National Review, which I most emphatically did not see coming. And Trump, of course, then compounded his folly with an executive order of unusual stupidity, announcing a war of some sort against the Silicon Valley smarty-pants who deign to make rules about what people can post on their sites. As Reason’s Nick Gillespie points out, Trump is even worse on this issue than Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren only because he’s president and they’re not.
Oh, and the Trump administration is compulsively involving itself in international shoving matches with the World Health Organization, and China, and Iran, and Venezuela, and, probably, Switzerland too, and anyone else, really, who wants a fat lip, because Donnie’s ratings are down, and when Donnie’s ratings are down, Donnie wants a fight.
I could do a post on any and all of these issues, but with the country burning, they don’t seem that relevant.
Afterwords
Reason magazine has been covering the issue of police brutality, and how union contracts protect lawless officers, for decades. As Scott Shackford notes, “Even Police Unions Trash the Actions of the Cop Who Killed George Floyd”, asking “Are we seeing a tipping point where police begin to grasp why the public is so outraged?” Also at Reason, C. J. Ciaramella explains how the noxious constitutional doctrine of “qualified immunity”, established and tightened by both liberals and conservatives on the Supreme Court, has countenanced gross criminal behavior by police officers to an extraordinary degree in his article “The Supreme Court Has a Chance To End Qualified Immunity and Prevent Cases Like George Floyd's”.
