Like many of you, I watched it happen on Monday when cops, military police, and other law enforcement advanced on a group of about 1000 peaceful protesters at Lafayette Park, right in front of the White House. We fucking saw it with our own eyes. We saw them approach threateningly, walking right up to the crowd and then rushing into them, firing tear gas (yes, a gas that caused tears, motherfuckers - we saw on live television as people were washing out their eyes), shoving people with shields and batons, shooting rubber bullets. and charging with horses. Fuckin' horses, man. At some point, these racist motherfuckers are gonna think the way to make America great again is to break out the firehoses and dogs (Trump already mentioned the possible use of dogs because of course he did).
And we knew that it was being done at the whim and for the pleasure of the vile man-child president, the bloated shitsack topped with a worn-out basketball. We knew it because his jolly jester of injustice, Attorney General William Barr, was there in the park just before shit went down, smirking like he's secretly got a tiny hard-on in his fat man's pants because he just looked at kiddie snuff porn, and he ordered it to happen. We knew it because the clearing of the area near the White House happened just as Donald Trump, who we are damned to call "president," was about to speak. He wanted the chaos to be happening as he announced, "I am your President of law and order," followed by "and an ally of all peaceful protesters," with no sense of the irony of what was happening to peaceful protesters within earshot.
I thought the moment was depraved enough. He knew that news networks would show a split screen of him with his faux tough guy act, standing there like a dollar store Mussolini, tossing cheap meat to his idiot hordes by saying he would defend "your Second Amendment rights," and threatening to send in the U.S. military if violence wouldn't end. It was pure, unadulterated weakness and cowardice. He didn't talk to protesters as if they are fellow Americans. He talked to everyone like we're his subjects. He was another punk, a pussy-ass bitch, pretending like he gave a shit about anything other than how his little performance would look on a campaign video, his toad head, his ostrich posture, and his voice like Ronald Reagan injected with monkey rabies, all seen as assets by the grifters who shit on his moron followers and laugh about how fucking easy it is to fool the blind.
But then we learned the real reason for the police violence against the people who were peacefully protesting police violence against black people. The speech wasn't the photo op. No, all those people needed to be cleared out because the most powerful person in the world was embarrassed that he had scooted his bovine ass into the bunker in the White House because he was shitting himself about the protesters outside, so he wanted to seem strong because he felt he looked weak. So he decided that after his pussy-ass speech, he would take a stroll across the park to St. John's Episcopal Church.
We were treated to the spectacle of this dump truck of a human being waddle on the sidewalks, leading the way as Barr and other cabinet members, along with assorted lackeys, lickspittles, and Jared, as well as daughter Ivanka in stiletto heels and a purse so white that it looked like it was made from a KKK robe. That purse contained a Bible because the reason that Trump lumbered over there after the people protesting the racist murder of George Floyd by a white police officer and the racist legacy of America were gassed and beaten to clear the way was so he could have his picture taken holding the Bible like a fraudulent preacher in a Flannery O'Connor story. Then he took an awkward photo with several of those who had accompanied him, all white as Ivanka's designer handbag, as the protest against the murder of African Americans was happening a couple of blocks away.
And, sure as shit, the White House released a video of the walk, complete with martial music and images like Trump walking with rows on either side of soldiers and cops in riot gear, holding shields, lined up like knock-off Roman centurions, ready to battle for their Little Caesar. If you had said it was a parody of a dictator, I'd have believed you because it was like Trump took the lines between church and state, between the military and civilians, and fist-fucked them in public. It was that startling and, frankly, unbelievable. But nothing really should be anymore.
Like so many moments over the last 4+ years, this should have been the end of it, of Trump's political career, of his moronic movement that elevates belligerence over intelligence, of a cruel narcissism that is best understood as evil, of the entire facade that any of this had anything to do with leading the American people instead of self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement. All that should have been torched. Alas, it was not because we are not a country capable of that kind of transformation. So we gotta fight it out.
Now we're getting the excuses, the distancing, the lying to make the whole thing seem far more anodyne than the insidious clusterfuck it was.
- Absurdly, Trump says that he didn't go hide in the bunker like an obese dachshund pissing itself under the bed in a thunderstorm. No, it was "more for an inspection" during the protests, a coincidence, really, in an excuse that's just so embarrassing that I don't even wanna be in the same species as him anymore.
- The Trump campaign wanted the media to retract that tear gas was used to break up the peaceful protest, despite the Park Police admitting that it used both smoke bombs and pepper balls (which essentially explode and release a gas that causes, well, tears). Media Matters kicked the retraction demand right in the taint.
- Trump was severely criticized by area leaders of two Christian faiths. The DC Episcopal bishop was pissed about the fascistic photo op. And the DC Catholic archbishop was pissed that Trump undulated over to the shrine to Pope John Paul II for another creepy ass photo with Melania, who looks as if she's thinking that sweet kiss of death can't come soon enough.
- Military leaders are scrambling to say that they thought the Lafayette Park assault was wrong, and Defense Secretary Mike Esper said he didn't know they were strolling through the emptied park for a quick pic at the church, which has pissed off the simpleton president because one of his loyal ball washers missed a hair.
- Oh, and the world is actually laughing at Trump and at us now when it's not recoiling in horror.
- Oh, and this was after he had berated American governors for being too "weak" on protesters.
- Oh, and all of this was after he had called Vladimir Putin. No, really. Make of that what you will.
None of this has done a goddamn thing to quell the protests. In fact, in DC, they have grown larger in response to Trump's thuggishness. We have possibly reached a genuine inflection point, when it might be possible to enact real change when it comes to institutional, endemic racism, when it comes to the militarization of the police, when it comes to the power that has been taken from the people by leaders who don't give a single rat shit about the people.
We might not be able to wait six months. Or, really, over eight months, even if Trump loses, for change. We need an active and an activist Democratic Party, which needs to be making headlines, not making press releases. We need action from those leaders or they need to be replaced. And I'm not even talking about Joe Biden, who isn't in office right now and thus has no power beyond giving speeches and making appearances (which he is doing, even if they're not getting coverage).
It's time for Democrats to behave like black Americans are the ones who put Democrats over the line in election after election. This country already has enough of a debt to people of color. Let's pay back part of what they're owed by embracing this moment of resistance - genuine, not hashtag, resistance, with bodies on the line - and striving for something more than what we have been willing to settle for time and again. Meet the fucking moment, or walk in shame, too.
