A city ablaze and a country in turmoil as Trump pours fuel on the flames

WATCHING the shocking scenes unfolding across the United States in the last week it is hard to avoid the conclusion that society is coming apart at the seams in ‘the land of the free’. After years of growing racial tension, cities across the country have erupted into violence as an angry underclass lashes out at the grossly unequal system currently presided over by Donald Trump.

The spark that lit the flame was the death in police custody in Minneapolis of African American man George Floyd.

Video footage that has incensed vast swathes of US society showed a police officer with his knee on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes as the man – who had been arrested for an alleged minor cheque fraud offence – struggled to breathe and pleaded with the officers to release him.

Mr Floyd is the latest in a long list of African American men and women who have died in police hands but the reaction to his death has sparked a far more visceral and violent reaction.

In scenes akin to the LA riots of 1992, Minneapolis descended into a state of near anarchy with police fleeing in the face of angry crowds as protesters took to the streets in their thousands.

Images of a burning police station quickly spread around the world, offering a flaming indictment of race relations and the bitter divisions that have become a hallmark of Trump’s America.

As Minneapolis burned, protests quickly spread to other cities with violent scenes on the streets of Denver; Indianapolis; Detroit; Columbus, Ohio; Oakland, California. In New York police fired rubber bullets on protesters and arrested 40 people. Curfews have been imposed and there have been further deaths.

Amid the turmoil one of the most stunning images of the riots – and one which will surely be remembered for years to come – came in Minneapolis where a CNN reporter and his crew were arrested live on air as they covered the chaos in the city.

That the reporter – arrested in front of lines of masked and faceless, baton wielding riot police – is himself African American only added to the symbolism of the footage.

With his country convulsing and in desperate need of leadership, Donald Trump chose to pour petrol on the flames.

Taking to his platform of choice, Twitter, Trump decried the ‘thugs’ in the streets and strongly suggested they would be shot. ‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts,’ he wrote. The warning from the Oval Office was so stunning that it prompted Twitter – who have until recently allowed Trump free reign to spout his vitriol on their platform – to place a warning on the Tweet labelling it an incitement to violence.

Trump’s words were short, sharp and shocking. It turns out they were also borrowed. The line was taken from Miami’s Chief of Police Walter Headley during the ‘Long Hot Summer’ of 1967, at the height of the Civil Rights struggle.

On that occasion Headley was referring to rioters who took to the streets after a group of white police officers dangled a terrified African American teenager off a bridge.

If that is who Trump thinks to quote as a racial storm engulfs his nation, one dreads to think where all this might end.