Your lying eyes
The widely viewed video of Buffalo, N.Y., police officers knocking over 75yearold protester Martin Gugino, leaving him prone and bleeding on a sidewalk, provided one of several disturbing echoes of the police killing that sparked nationwide demonstrations. Like the asphyxiation of George Floyd in Minneapolis, it was an obviously excessive use of force against a man posing no immediate threat.
Gugino, by all accounts a passionate but pacifist gadfly, was hospitalized, and two officers were suspended without pay and charged with assault. Rather than acknowledge or accept the plain truth, however, President Trump groped for the nearest piece of disinformation with which to smear one victim on the day another was being buried.
The tall tale the president promoted Tuesday on Twitter portrayed Gugino as a violent leftwing agitator whose phone was a device designed to interfere with police radios and whose fall was faked. Trump gleaned this fantasia from San Diegobased One America News Network, a lightly viewed, farright conspiracy factory where it was presented by an actual Russian state propagandist.
Trump information minister Kayleigh McEnany pressed the attack Wednesday, charging Gugino with a crime of which her boss is a prominent perpetrator: “very questionable tweets.”
Growing popular disaffection with Trump has inflamed his antidemocratic impulses. Amid broadly supported protests and sinking polls, the president and his lieutenants have preemptively meddled with the election, violently evicted protesters from the doorstep of the White House, and threatened to deploy the military to U.S. cities. Now he has reacted to a glaring case of state brutality with that ageold authoritarian mantra: You didn’t see what you just saw.