By now, millions of Americans have watched the video in which Buffalo police officers shove 75-year old protestor Martin Gugino, causing him to fall and crack his head on the sidewalk, where he then lay prone and bleeding as multiple cops marched by him without offering assistance. The city suspended the two officers directly involved in the incident, spurring 57 others to resign their positions from the city’s Emergency Response Team. This past Saturday, prosecutors charged the pair who pushed Gugino over with felony assault charges. Gugino remains hospitalized.
According to the New York Times, Gugino is a long-time activist on issues including “military drones, climate change, nuclear weapons and police brutality,” and is described by friends as “mild-mannered.” However, today President Donald Trump tweeted unfounded speculation that Gugino might actually be a member of antifa who staged the whole bloody and grotesque episode. His tweet has provoked widespread derision and mockery, as so many of his tweets deserve, but the particular outlandishness of this one deserves a closer look (even as we bear in mind the possibility that this lopsided encounter in Buffalo simply caught the president’s attention through a random misfiring of synapses in the mausoleum of pudding and vomit that constitutes his brain). The video is such a clear demonstration of police brutality, and against a white person, no less, that its unmistakable lesson is that no one of any station is safe from the police; this, surely, is not a welcome message for our authoritarian president. For him, the police can never be wrong, which means that muddying the waters around Gugino’s affiliation and actions is necessary to preserve the unholy fiction of immaculate policing.
But just as it’s hard to look away from the bare cruelty depicted in the video, I also can’t look away from the self-defeating and revealing stupidity of Trump’s comments. The president, and indeed much of the right-wing propaganda apparatus, has spent years demonizing antifa, building up this loose agglomeration of antifascist activists into a modern-day domestic equivalent of al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Black Panthers rolled into one. And as I wrote yesterday, this propaganda has been effective, providing fertile ground for rumors of marauding antifa banditos to burn through small towns across the land. But now the president has turned this fearsome narrative on its head: antifa are actually fragile septuagenarians who the police can knock over as easy as one-two-three. What horrors will this Senior Brigade unleash on an unsuspecting America next? Compulsory bingo? Might they seek to infuse our water supply with high levels of fiber?
Donald Trump may have stepped on his own anti-antifascist (or, to simplify the verbiage, fascist) propaganda due to personal stupidity, but I think it reveals once again the basic method behind the madness. He and his ilk want Americans to be scared of everything, so that they turn to his strongman rule out of fear. I mean, if Donald Trump could make us afraid of literally all our fellow Americans, that would indeed be a net win for him. But trying to pin a terror rap on a 75-year old peaceful protestor show the desperation and hollowness at these attempts to scare and divide us. At this point, Trump can’t even decide who we should be frightened of; he just knows that he wants us to be scared!
I also can’t help speculate that there might be some relation between Trump’s demonization of Gugino and recent polls showing senior Americans turning against his re-election in a pretty significant way. To Trump’s reptilian brain, it probably feels pretty good to see the police drawing blood from a member of a demographic that appears to be in the process of stabbing him in the back.