Over at The Nation, Jeet Heer homes in on a central element of the grotesquely disproportionate governmental response against largely peaceful anti-police violence protests around the country: the basic weakness of President Trump’s political position as the November elections draw inexorably closer. Heer argues that the president has been drawn to a hyper-militarized response to protests in Washington, D.C. to compensate for his humiliating retreat to the White House bunker last week, and more generally as an effort to show strength as his standing with his base shows signs of fraying.
The president’s effort to deploy maximal levels of the U.S. armed forces to the streets of D.C., on top of the presence of thousands of members of various other security agencies, is so disproportionate to the actual threat — overwhelmingly peaceful protestors making their voices heard on the issue of police violence and systemic racism — that it inherently turns into a display of fearfulness, in the same way that a mobster who pulls a gun on a grandma who accidentally bumps into him says less about his fantastic draw speed and more about his psychotic overreaction.
Of course, the president and his team have endeavored to validate their moves as a true show of strength by pumping up the threat in the streets to fantastical and mendacious levels. Despite the fact that we saw last week the administrations’s cold-blooded willingness to tear gas peaceful protestors to provide the president with a campaign photo-op, the president and his defenders insist that they are beset by an unholy alliance of anarchists, antifa, and other malcontents who should collectively be considered as domestic terrorists, bent on relieving the republic of life and property, starting with the White House silver — a threat that they mysteriously seem unable to substantiate.
In other words, the president’s effort to appear strong relies almost entirely not only on the most paranoid and deluded lies imaginable about a nation besieged, but on simultaneously denying the import of the actual protestors and the issues they’re fighting for. The inability and unwillingness to cope with urgent issues of justice surely count as a deep ineptness on the part of the president.
But it isn’t totally crazy for Donald Trump and his advisors to think that displays of military might and the infliction of violence on protestors can make him look powerful, and even be powerful — if power is thought of as the ability to impose your will on others without consequence. But this is a crude notion of power completely incompatible with a democracy and its requirements of public participation, consent of the governed, open debate, equality under the law, and respect for human rights. If the United States were to be invaded and occupied by a foreign power, we would all certainly consider that invader to be powerful — but powerful in a way wholly divorced from notions of justice, freedom, or our common good. Such is the conceptual territory the president and the GOP are beginning to embrace. It is the criminal power of strength through terror and authoritarianism.