Trump pours fuel on flames
President ‘goads’ racism protesters with guns threat as US erupts in fifth night of riots over police killing
DONALD TRUMP was last night accused of ‘fanning the flames’ of race riots by goading protesters who threatened to scale the walls of the White House, saying they ‘would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, the most ominous weapons’.
In a series of inflammatory tweets, he also praised the Secret Service for controlling the ‘big crowd’ – some burning US flags – outside the presidential residence in Washington.
‘They let the “protesters” scream & rant as much as they wanted but whenever someone got too frisky or out of line they would quickly come down on them, hard,’ Mr Trump said.
‘Nobody came close to breaching the fence. If they had they would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs and the most ominous weapons I’ve ever seen. That’s when people would have been really badly hurt. Many Secret Service agents just waiting for action.’
As America braced itself for a fifth night of riots in cities from Los Angeles to New York in protest at the death of black restaurant worker George Floyd, who was killed by a white police officer kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes last Monday, Mr Trump refused to back down from an earlier inflammatory comment: ‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts.’
Controversially, the phrase was first used in 1967 by Miami’s police chief during a crackdown on ‘hoodlums’. He said the city hadn’t ‘faced serious problems with civil uprisings and looting because I’ve let the word filter down that when the looting starts, the shooting starts. We don’t mind being accused of police brutality.’
A spokesman for the Black Lives Matter movement said: ‘This President has proved himself time and again to be a racist. He thinks nothing of fanning the flames of hatred and bigotry. He has blood on his hands.’
In the most violent, widespread protests America has seen in nearly three decades, a police officer and a protester were shot dead, and dozens more wounded. At the headquarters of TV news channel CNN in Atlanta, police snipers trained guns on youths who smashed their way into the building. Police stations in Minneapolis and Oakland, California, were set on fire while in Colorado shots were fired outside the state’s main assembly building.
Last night, police fired rubber bullets into crowds in one of LA’s most upmarket shopping areas. Hundreds of protesters took to the streets in West Hollywood and started smashing up police vehicles. One protester said: ‘ If they want a fight we will give them one.’
In New York protesters descended on Times Square for a mass demonstration. And in WashingAMERICA’S
BURNING: A protester against a wall of fire in Minneapolis yesterday
ton DC the Trump Hotel, owned by the President, was locked down after rioters try to smash their way in using baseball bats.
In Minnesota the governor said he would use the ‘full force’ of the military to stop looting.
Mr Trump has now authorised the army to take to the streets for the first time since 1992 when riots erupted in LA following the beating of another black man, Rodney King, by four white policemen.
Protests and looting erupted in Denver, Louisville, Dallas and Houston over the past days causing an estimated £200million in damage.
The events led sports company Nike to change its ‘Just Do It’ slogan on a commercial airing coast-tocoast to: ‘For once. Just don’t do it.’
Floyd, 46, a 6ft 6in so-called ‘gentle giant’, was filmed pleading for his life after four police officers threw him to the ground outside a convenience store in Minneapolis on Monday night after they suspected him of trying to buy cigarettes with a forged $20 note.
Policeman Derek Chauvin, 44, was filmed by bystanders choking a handcuffed Floyd to death with his knee pressed against his windpipe as Floyd begged for his life saying ‘I can’t breathe’ and crying for his dead mother. Chauvin has been ‘Protesting and rioting is language of the unheard’ charged with third degree murder and manslaughter and faces up to 35 years in jail. His beauty queen wife filed for divorce late Friday night saying she was ‘devastated’ for the dead man’s family. And a woman who coincidentally employed both Chauvin and Floyd at her Minneapolis nightclub claimed the police officer ‘always had issues with blacks’ and would use ‘overt force’ including macing an entire crowd to stop fights.
There has been mounting anger that three other police officers involved in Floyd’s arrest have yet to be charged Actor Jamie Foxx who joined protests in Minneapolis called the action a ‘festering boil’.
Floyd’s brother Philonise said: ‘People are torn and hurt because they’re tired of seeing black men die constantly, over and over again. This is not a one-time thing, it’s going to last for ever. I’m never going to get my brother back.’
He later added that Trump called to offer condolences but the call was ‘so fast’ he did not get a chance to speak: ‘I kept trying to talk to him but he kept pushing me off, like, “I don’t want to hear what you’re talking about”.’
University research in 2015 found that black residents of Minneapolis were almost nine times more likely than whites to be arrested for low-level offences. Nationally, black men are jailed at more than five times the rate of white men. Forty per cent of the prison population is black.
Floyd had been sentenced to five years in jail in 2009 after being charged with armed robbery. His family lawyer Benjamin Crump hired an independent forensic pathologist after the official autopsy report said Floyd’s body showed no signs of strangulation. It suggested ‘underlying medical conditions’ contributed to his death. The autopsy report listed ‘police restraint combined with heart disease and potential intoxicants’ (Floyd was reportedly drunk) as the cause of death.
Mr Crump said: ‘This cannot be another case where the cops are allowed to get away with the murder of an innocent black man.’ Echoing the words of civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King, he added that ‘protesting and rioting is the language of the unheard’.
Floyd’s killing is the latest in a long list of brutal ‘white-on-black’ murders. Earlier this month footage emerged of a black jogger, Ahmaud Arbery, being followed by two white men in a truck as he jogged through residential streets in Georgia. He was gunned down because his assailants wrongly thought he was a burglar.
As someone who has lived and loved America since moving here from Britain in 1992 three months after the LA riots when politicians and public officials spoke of ‘changing the system’, I fear that little has changed – except the everexpanding roll-call of victims’ names. Like school shootings, each killing sparks outrage and demands for reform – but little happens.
What has changed is that America is even more polarised. Not just racially, but there’s a deepening class and political divide – which has been exacerbated by Mr Trump’s presidency and the coronavirus pandemic which has seen 100,000 Americans die and left 40 million unemployed. The virus has particularly hit black communities.
‘The threads of our civic life could start unravelling, because everybody’s living in a tinderbox,’ said historian and Rice University professor Douglas Brinkley.
All this poses a huge problem for Mr Trump in election year as his victory in 2016 was partly thanks to the fact more than 4million black voters who voted for Barack Obama, a Democrat, did not vote in 2016.
As a result, Republican Mr Trump claimed: ‘We did great with the African American community.’
Since then, he’s heightened the division between races with inflammatory language which it is said has encouraged extremism. During a visit to Alabama earlier this year, I was stunned to see the Confederate flag – the emblem of the Deep South during America’s civil war which has become in some parts a white supremacist symbol – being flown alongside the Stars and Stripes on public buildings.
People spoke openly about ‘guns and God’. One man praised comments Mr Trump made about immigrants from Africa and Haiti ‘coming from sh*tholes’ telling me: ‘Well, that’s true isn’t it?’
It is a side of America many rarely see. Most British visitors go to diverse multicultural cities such New York, Los Angeles and Miami.
Or they watch the products of Hollywood and US TV which tend to give a very rosy view of the American way of life. Yet in the vast heartland of America, Trump’s hardcore supporters laud his views.
Indeed, a spokesman for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) said: ‘This President has caused more racial conflict and hatred than any other since the civil rights movement began. His language incites hatred and division. He uses racism as a political tool.’
Minnesota police department chief Medaria Arrandondo expressed the feelings of many when he said there was ‘a deficit of hope’ in Minneapolis, the state’s biggest city. As I sat at my window watching police helicopters circle over downtown LA shining their spotlight beams on the rioters, like many in America, my heart grieved.
Will George Floyd’s death finally be the one which bucks the system and helps America heal? Sadly, I doubt it. The firefighters will put out the flames but the racial tensions that torment this country will continue to burn.