Scary times? President doesn’t know half of it
‘A re you scared?”
I asked my unmarried and almost-30 son that question as we had a sushi lunch. “Working on a column?” he responded.
Guilty. I assured him that I was only seeking a grassroots response to President Trump’s latest effort to make Americans feel afraid of one another.
“It’s a very scary time for young men in America,” Trump told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House complex, “when you can be guilty of something you may not be guilty of. This is a very difficult time.”
Trump was speaking on behalf of his Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The day after university professor Christine Blasey Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Kavanaugh forcibly groped her in high school, Trump called her a “very credible witness.”
But by Monday, as Republicans detected that the controversy was energizing their base barely a month before the November midterm elections, Trump had turned on Ford, accused her of participating in a “hoax” that “all made” up and “fabricated” by Democrats.
“Think of your son. Think of your husband,” Trump told a rally in Southaven, Mississippi last week. He also mentioned that he has had “many false allegations” against him. Well, he’s had the allegations anyway. Their truthfulness is still a matter of hot debate.
But a “very scary time?” Hey, Mr. President, welcome to my world.
That’s why I asked my son to be patient with his old man and answer my question. Edited down and cleansed of expletives, he responded like this: “I’m a black man with dreadlocks in a city full of nervous police. Shouldn’t I be scared?”
Just use good judgment, I advised in a way that I don’t expect him to appreciate fully until he’s raising kids of his own. “Like Laquan McDonald?”
Ah, yes. The ghost of Laquan hangs like a cloud over young black men these days, whether they’re in Chicago or, like my son, other parts of America.
McDonald was killed by Jason Van Dyke, a white Chicago police officer, who was convicted of second-degree murder last week in the October 2014 shooting. Police have killed suspects on duty before, but this was the first in almost 50 years to result in a conviction.
This one might well have ended the same way had the shooting of 16 bullets into McDonald’s body not been caught on video cameras. Still, three other Chicago officers who never fired a shot that night stand charged with initiating an apparent cover-up that led to a yearlong effort to keep a video of the shooting out of public view.
Nine other officers were at the scene. The case against those who were charged with lying and conspiring to keep Van Dyke out of trouble is seen as a major test of the city’s effort to break up the cover-up culture that enforces a so-called police code of silence.
Chicago is not alone with such problems. But its long-running cover-up culture has fed widespread distrust in Chicago between police and the public they are supposed to serve. That culture of distrust has made residents reluctant to report crimes or serve as witnesses, which further fuels a homicide rate that in recent years has been higher than the nation’s two larger cities, New York and Los Angeles, combined.
I agree with Trump that everyone should be presumed innocent until proved otherwise. But I couldn’t help but feel disappointed by his apparent amnesia concerning his own most famous guilt presumption: the case of the Central Park Five.
In 1989, five black and Hispanic New York teenagers were falsely accused of brutally raping a white woman in Central Park. Before a serial killer confessed to the crimes, they had served six to 13 years in prison. During their imprisonment, high-profile real estate developer Donald Trump placed full-page ads in the four daily New York newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty.
And after the five were freed? True to form, Trump has refused as recently as a 2016 CNN interview to express any regret over his Central Park Five campaign. That’s our president. Now he cautions young men to be afraid of “scary” complaints of sexual assault and harassment. Look who’s talking.