Editorial, Letters
The protests against systemic racism that followed the police killing of George Floyd continued throughout the nation over the weekend, with crowds growing larger in many cases with far fewer incidents of looting, violence or clashes with law enforcement. It was notable that police took a much lighter approach in most of those cities. Peace, principle, passion — and respect for the U.S. Constitution — dominated the streets, exposing the folly of President Trump’s week of rhetoric in which he taunted governors as “weak” in their response and threatened to send active U.S. troops to American cities to quell the unrest.
On Sunday, Trump announced that National Guard troops would be withdrawn from the nation’s capital now that “everything is under perfect control.” He added that they could “quickly return” if needed.
The determined yet disciplined tone of the large weekend gatherings underscored that the mayhem created by a few opportunists in the chaos was not what these protests are all about. They may have been prompted by the horrific death of Floyd as a Minneapolis officer pressed his knee against the handcuffed African American man’s neck for nearly nine minutes, but the concerns extended to the broader issues of entrenched inequality and injustice in society.
Trump inflamed the crisis atmosphere with his talk about bringing the military into the fray with its “ominous weapons,” unleashing “vicious dogs” on any protester who dared to scale the fences around White House grounds, and tweeting “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
The administration’s authoritarian instincts and contempt for dissent were on full public view last Monday when Park Police forcefully cleared peaceful protesters out of Lafayette Square using chemical gas, rubber bullets and metal riot shields as the president was making yet more provocative statements in the Rose Garden. Soon after the irritants dissipated — and the demonstrators were gone — Trump walked across the street for a photoop, holding up a Bible in front of St. John’s Church.
That ironfisted move was too much for some Americans who have spent their careers in defense of the nation’s values at the highest levels of the U.S. military. It’s hard to overstate the rarity of former generals speaking out against a current commander in chief. But speak out they did, in emphatic terms about the danger of Trump’s actions to American democracy.
Jim Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general who had served as Trump’s secretary of defense, led the way.
“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us,” Mattis wrote Wednesday in the Atlantic. “We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.” Others quickly jumped in to defend Mattis, including John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general and who served as Trump’s White House chief of staff.
Retired Gen. Merrill McPeak, an Air Force chief of staff in the 1990s, called on Trump to stop “tarnishing the military” by deploying troops against Americans. John Allen, a retired fourstar general in the Marine Corps, suggested the June 1 move against protesters “may well signal the beginning of the end of the American experiment.”
Their voices, and the scale and resonance of the protests, suggest that American ideas are coming to the fore at this critical hour.