A NATION ON THE EDGE
■ As Trump amplifies alarm for governors to act, fears grow over president’s increasingly authoritarian tone ■ Protesters stream back onto streets in cities across United States amid heavy law enforcement presence
WASHINGTON— In front of St. John’s Church across from Lafayette Square near the White House, after members of the clergy condemned Donald Trump on Tuesday for having used the historic holy building a day earlier as a partisan prop, a cellist played a solemn song that blended with the chants of hundreds of nearby protesters.
The words they used were by now familiar — “No justice! No peace,” and “Put down your guns!” — but in the last 24 hours, the situation had changed. Chain-link fences had been erected to keep protesters out of the park, allowing police who had spent days standing at attention behind shields to lounge on benches. The sound of helicopters could regularly be heard there and around Washington — ominous to many who had seen the military Blackhawks hovering low Monday night over protesters, overwhelming them with blasting wind and sound.
Among the protesters was Terrence Comella, who lives in nearby Alexandria, Va. He said the death of George Floyd was tragic, but also a “spark that lit a tinderbox” that had been built up over decades and centuries of racial injustice. This was his first time joining a demonstration since they began last week, and he explained that Trump’s Monday photo-op and the speech that preceded it were what brought him out.
“We have a president of the United States who thinks he’s a king. He constantly overstates his powers, and last night, he threatened to send military into cities to quell riots against the wished of those states’ elected representatives. That’s civil war — that’s beyond anything that I ever thought I’d have to deal with in America, and it scares me.”
He was not alone, at the protest or beyond, in his fear of Trump’s increasingly authoritarian tone.
“We have a president of the United States who thinks he’s a king.” TERRENCE COMELLA PROTESTER
Some have long warned that Trump is pursuing a dangerous path familiar from authoritarian regimes: asserting authority over law enforcement and appearing to use them to protect himself and pursue his enemies; engaging in confrontational and divisive rhetoric catering to white nationalists; employing hard and punishing policies against immigrants and refugee applicants.
In Georgetown, a few miles west of the protest, where voters were lined up to cast their ballots in the primary election, the spectre of authoritarianism loomed. Jim Malec said the president’s Monday actions were on his mind as he waited to vote.
“Authoritarians and strongmen always use the pretext of violent action as a pretext to crack down on freedom of expression and protest,” he said. “I think the steps the president took were purely a show of force, and I think they were intentional. I think they sent the message that the president does not care about the message the protesters are sending him.”
In his new book, one-time George Bush speechwriter David Frum called Trump a “fascoid” — similar to a fascist, but slightly different. On the phone Tuesday morning, Yale University professor Jason Stanley, author of the book “How Fascism Works,” wasn’t drawing such a distinction. His phone had been ringing off the hook, he said, because “fascism is having a moment” in America.
“It’s alarming,” he said of Trump’s actions. “He wants to see how far he can go. And he’s always going to go as far as he can go.”
The latest: Trump threatened on Monday to deploy the military to break up violent protests if governors refused to use the National Guard to “dominate” demonstrators. That was immediately followed by a scene in which, as Trump claimed to be an ally of peaceful protestors, a peaceful protest was forcibly cleared so he could walk across the park to pose for a photo.
“I mean every kind of authoritarian you know: tear-gassing peaceful protesters as a sort of symbol of macho authority for no other reason but to use them in a campaign ad?” said Stanley. “Well, that’s what happened.”
In the hours after on Monday, military Humvees were stationed around D.C., helicopters hovered overhead, protesters were kettled to enforce a curfew, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — the head of the American military — was shown in news report walking the streets in full battle dress.
“Authoritarians are always seeking to provoke a crisis. Because when you provoke a crisis, you can … take authority, you represent yourself as a strong man, and you can seize control,” Stanley said. “The only interest Trump has in a crisis is how it can help him gain more power. There is zero other interest … I mean he ran in 2016 against Black Lives Matter. His opponent is Black people and leftists.
“This is a perfect crisis that he can fit himself into.”
The Republican party, which controls most of the levers of power, has shown no inclination to rein Trump in.
“The Republicans are attacking elections, and they now control the courts for generations to come, and these courts have shown themselves to be as partisan as the courts in Hungary and Poland,” said Stanley. “The Republican Party really openly talks about seizing the courts, they’re not even shy about it, you know. So, there is no more democracy and there is no — there isn’t much hope.”
The protesters were not dissuaded from their cause by Trump’s words or actions — at least not in mid-afternoon. Eric Patterson, a nearby resident who attended the protest with a sign bearing Floyd’s name, said, “A long time ago, I stopped worrying about what Donald Trump thinks about. The things he says are not fitting for — never mind the leader of a nation, of a rational human being.”
Patterson said he’d shown up because bodies in the street would be a measure spurring real change, and he said the country needed a change of leadership and of policies — the kind that would end the racial injustice that has for too long plagued his country.
“This has been happening forever, and it just has to stop. It has to stop.”
He repeated it again, pausing after each word. “It. Has. To. Stop.”