With Trump "There is no rock bottom"

Lennart Gabel

Frank Rich in New York magazine:

...After urban riots left 43 dead in Detroit and 26 in Newark. Lyndon Johnson, the president who fought tirelessly to redress the nation’s racial and economic inequities, created a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate what had happened. 

The Kerner Commission, named after the Illinois governor who chaired it, produced a voluminous report that was published and promptly ignored as the country melted-down in 1968. 

Its 600-plus pages in my old paperback edition can be reduced to a single finding on page eight: The No. 1 cause of the unrest was “Police Practices,” which resulted in “a widespread belief among Negroes in the existence of police brutality and in a ‘double standard’ of justice and protection---one for Negroes and one for whites.”

It was late in 1967, as the Kerner commission was reaching this conclusion, that the police chief of Miami, Walter Headley, responded to his city’s unrest by declaring “war” on criminals, vowing to go after them with shotguns and dogs, killing them if need be: “I’ve let the word filter down that when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he said. 

The coinage was echoed by the white supremacist third party candidate of 1968, the Alabama governor George Wallace, who would win five Southern states and come close to throwing the tight presidential election into the House of Representatives.

It was, of course, Headley’s message that Trump revived in his tweet last weekend---though in Trump’s case, it turned out that he was willing to inflict violent punishment even on those who are not looting. 

He and his attorney general Bill Barr unleashed rubber bullets and gas on peaceful protesters, including clergy, to clear the stage for the photo op in which he held up an upside-down Bible that had been carried to St. John’s Church by his daughter in a $1,540 Max Mara handbag. 

This religious tableau was carried out by the President with an all-white cadre that included the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff...

Most Vichy Republicans in Washington are remaining silent even so, unless you count the Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, who did his part to uphold Walter Headley’s legacy by calling for American troops to go to war against their own citizens to restore order. 

Unlike Trump, he took the trouble to pretty up Headley’s words a bit by fashioning them into an Op-Ed piece that the Times saw fit to publish — on grounds redolent of Facebook — despite its bloodthirsty tenor and its inclusion of a discredited Antifa conspiracy theory to justify its call for martial law...

We’ve been there too many times before. Feckless liberals who did little or nothing as police abuses piled up on their watch, whether Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota or Bill de Blasio in New York, have zero excuse.

The legions of Republicans in public office who stand idly by as Trump and his MAGA claque of racists occupy the White House are indistinguishable from their forebears---whether Democrats of the Jim Crow era or their successors, the Republicans who took up the segregationist mantle from the Dixiecrats once Barry Goldwater ran for president in opposition to the Civil Rights Act in 1964. 

They can’t pretend now that they didn’t know Trump’s intentions from the start. Barely a month after his Inaugural address decrying “American carnage,” his attorney general, Alabama’s Jeff Sessions, started to dismantle Justice department programs monitoring rogue police departments...

“The election of 1868 in the South was one of the most violent in American history,” White writes, a “reign of terror” targeting black voters. In Florida, for instance, bands of white men armed with guns kept blacks from voting. It was “the last presidential contest to center on white supremacy,” wrote the historian Eric Foner in his definitive account of the period, Reconstruction. The Democrats’ incendiary campaign raised “the specter of a second Civil War.”

Grant triumphed. America was spared that second Civil War, albeit without eradicating the systemic toxins that have deprived black citizens of their lives, their rights, and economic equality ever since. 

Now we have another election that is centered on white supremacy, with a president and a major political party, abetted by the John Roberts Supreme Court, determined to do anything possible to block what Trump calls “the black people” from access to the one peaceful method for going forward, the ballot box.

“There is no such thing as rock bottom,” wrote George Will this week. “So, assume the worst is yet to come.” What form will that take? We know by now that 40 percent of the public and, George Will notwithstanding, 99 percent of Republican leaders and financial backers will remain loyal to Trump no matter what. 

We know that none of them complained when their voters, who define “liberty” as their right to spread new lethal waves of COVID-19 with impunity, carried assault weapons into state capitols...