There seems to be a lot of selective amnesia among the GOP these days.
During Trump’s term, the nation was challenged with yet another Police murder of an unarmed Black Man. Protests erupted. Outside agitators stoked violence, fires and shootings. The nation erupted in chaos, violence and division. And how did Trump respond?
He called George Floyd’s death a “Grave Tragedy” — which was nice of him — and then told police to “crackdown on protestors.” He claimed that the protestors were…
Profesionaly managed so-called “protestors” at the White House had little to do with memory of George Floyd. There were just there to cause trouble. The @SecretService handled them easily. Tonight, I understand, is MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE??? do
So not much solidarity with the movement. And not much concern about the larger problem. No effort at all to implement police reform, or even to have the FBI investigate these police departments for abuse. And he also claimed…
By the way they love African-American people. They over black people. MAGA loves Black people.
Then after the clashes outside the fence he goes.
Nobody breached the fence. If they had, they would have been greeted by the most vicious dogs and ominous weapons I have ever seen.
Yeah, so great. DC Mayor Bowser had a reaction to that.
To make a reference to vicious dogs is no subtle reminder to African-American of segregationists who let dogs on women, children and innocent people in the South.
Yes, how very Bull Connor of him.
And yet he continued.
These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let it happen. Just spoke to Gov. Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control, when the looting starts the shooting starts. Thank you.
This was his opening salvo, this was how he began things. And it got worse from there.
Trump’s original Attorney General was Jeff Sessions who frankly didn’t give 2 shits about police violence or murder. He didn’t care about previous investigations that had been done by the Obama Administration and blocked their effort to implement consent decrees intended to help clean those departments up.
If the United States attorney general sharply limits the power of the Justice Department to oversee police reforms in state and local jurisdictions, what becomes of Ferguson, Mo.?
The city, a suburb of St. Louis, is undergoing reforms under a so-called consent decree — an agreement between the Justice Department and a local jurisdiction, enforced by a federal judge, to overhaul a law enforcement agency that has been accused of abuses and civil rights violations.
Ferguson’s consent decree was enacted in 2016, two years after Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot and killed by a white police officer there.
The agreement is one of 14 currently being overseen by the Justice Department. But last week, just before he was forced out of office, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions signed a memorandum strictly limiting their use.
Now, top political appointees must sign off on the deals, there are new limits on their scope and duration, and department lawyers must lay out evidence of additional violations beyond unconstitutional behavior.
Civil rights groups were quick to condemn the move, and the United States Commission on Civil Rights, a bipartisan federal agency, on Thursday urged the Justice Department to reverse course.
“Americans deserve police departments fully committed to constitutional policing,” Catherine E. Lhamon, the chairwoman of the commission, said. The Justice Department, she added, needed “to end dangerous backsliding on police reform.”
The memo signed by Mr. Sessions, a vocal critic of consent decrees for years, applies mostly to the enactment of new agreements. The existing consent decrees — in cities including Baltimore, Cleveland, New Orleans and Seattle — are still in place
So as soon as Trump came into office, Sessions started limiting and shut down the use of the only tool that has been shown to be effective at reducing police misconduct.
Shockingly, there was more and more misconduct.
Let’s first recall that there were over 8,700 protests and demonstrations that summer. According to law enforcement, there was violence at 576 of those protests. That is 7%.
93% present of the time, there was no looting, there was no vandalism, there was no violence of any kind. If simply being violent for it’s own sake had been the point of BLM, then they were pretty horrible at it since they failed to do that 93% of the time. Most of the violence was not from people who actually agree with the goals of the movement - which was to reduce police violence. Yes, there were thugs and criminals involved. Clearly, there were organized criminal gangs praying on retail establishments doing what we’ve later come to call “smash and grab” robberies.
But that was far from the majority of protestors. Not that Trumpsters cared to understand the distinction.
Here we see Trump supporters driving huge trucks directly through the protestors in Portland and hitting them with bear spray. Because that's just what he’d like to see.
Trump deployed Federal Officers to Portland to quell the protests against police violence, who proceeded to cause even more police violence.
Trump: These are anarchists, these are not protestors. These people are anarchists. These are people that hate our country. And we’re not gonna let it go forward.
These heavy-handed tactics didn’t work. The protests responded to the crackdown by growing even louder, and louder.
Not that he was willing to admit that or change course.
He complains here again about Anarchists and Arsonists.
What you’re seeing in Portland is the radical left’s agenda in action. If the radical left gets in and they treat - Joe Biden is a puppet. He’s merely a puppet. But if the radical gets in they look at Portland as a thing that they want. Why? Who knows? Doesn’t matter. It’s a different thinking, but its a mess.
Trump was obsessed with the idea that the violence was from anarchists, and to be totally fair - he wasn’t completely wrong. Much of the violence that happened in cities like Minneapolis was not implemented by BLM protestors - but was perpetrated by anarchist Boogaloo Bois who wanted to foster a Second American Revolution.
A rightwing extremist boasted of driving from Texas to Minneapolis to help set fire to a police precinct during the George Floyd protests, federal prosecutors said.
US attorney Erica MacDonald said on Friday that she had charged Ivan Harrison Hunter, a 26-year-old Texas resident, with traveling across state lines to participate in a riot. The charges are the latest example of far-right extremists attempting to use violence to escalate national protests against police brutality into an uprising against the government, and even full civil war.
The case also reveals the extent of the coordination between violent members of the nascent far-right “Boogaloo Bois” movement operating in different cities across the country.
According to the criminal complaint against Hunter, on 26 May, as intense protests broke out in Minneapolis over the killing of George Floyd by a city police officer, a “Boogaloo Boi” based in Minnesota posted a public Facebook message: “I need a headcount.”
Hunter, a resident of Boerne, Texas, which is roughly 1,200 miles away, responded: “72 hours out.”
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Another “Boogaloo Boi”, based in North Carolina, posted a public message the same day: “Lock and load boys,” he wrote, adding, “the national network is going off.”
Another major event, the shooting of a Federal Guard in Oakland during the protests was also performed by a Boogaloo Boi, Steven Carillo.
SAN FRANCISCO — A former U.S. Air Force staff sergeant and alleged member of the "boogaloo" extremist movement pleaded guilty Friday in the fatal shooting of a federal security officer in the San Francisco Bay Area amid large 2020 protests against police brutality.
Steven Carrillo, 33, changed his plea to guilty to a federal murder charge in the killing of David Patrick Underwood and to the attempted murder of Underwood's colleague after federal prosecutors last month agreed not to seek the death penalty.
The men were shot on May 29, 2020, while they stood in front of a federal building in Oakland as hundreds marched on the streets.
Dressed in an orange jumpsuit in federal court, Carrillo read from a plea agreement, admitting to posting messages on Facebook a day before the shooting asking anyone if they were "down to boog" and saying he was ready to act and not just talk. He also admitted firing 19 rounds from a homemade AR-15 rifle from the back of a white van being driven by a man he connected with online.
"I aligned myself with the anti-government movement and wanted to carry out violent acts against federal law enforcement officers in particular," Carrillo said.
25 people were killed during these riots. 11 of those people — nearly half — were killed by police, Boogaloos like Steven Carillo, counter-protestors like Kyle Rittenhouse and people who drove their cars through the protestors - which happened nearly a hundred times — running them over. [Just like in Charlottesville.] So if you’re going to point fingers at the source of all the violence - you’re going to need at least two hands.
And speaking of vehicular manslaughter, as angry as Trump was about these protests, that wasn’t the case during the violent protests in Charlottesville over the removal of the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee.
People were beaten bloody, one member of the Neo-Nazi group Identity Evropa slammed his car into a crowd injuring dozens and killing Heather Heyer.
Afterward, Trump made the bizarre claim that “you had many people in that group other than White nationalists and Neo-Nazis. and the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.”
You did? Where? The entire rally was a gathering of Neo-Nazis - that was the point - who was there in support of the statute who wasn’t a Neo-Nazi? This is where he claimed you had “fine people” on both sides, but he went a step further and then criticized “the Alt-Left, who came out swinging and running.”
Yeah, those were the people who lived in that city defending themselves. They had to do it on their own because the police wouldn’t engage with the Neo-Nazis. Police mostly stood back and let things happen.
And the Boogaloo Bois were there, dressed in combat fatigues.
They also showed up at the attack on the Capitol in 2021, which absolutely was not a “peaceful protest.”
Trumpsters here want to claim that this protest was “Non-violent” when it obviously wasn’t. However, it’s fair to note that of the approximately 9,000 people who stormed the Capitol grounds, only about 2,000 fought with cops and entered the building. So that’s 11% of them contrasted with 7% of the Floyd riots which became violent.
Which is worse? You tell me.
Also, they weren’t fighting for a “Nobel cause” - they were fighting to perpetuate a lie. A lie generated by Trump himself and most of the protestors themselves say that Trump inspired them.
The psychology of that attack is an interesting thing, it happened because Trump has a cultist relationship with his followers. They were willing to do anything he said, including attacking their own government.
Earlier in 2020 as the Coronavirus spread throughout the world, Trump repeatedly minimized its impact and danger. He mostly worried about how it would impact his campaign.
The stay-at-home orders were under Trump. The business and school shutdowns - were under TRUMP. It’s fair to say that Trump during his term reached a low point of 3.5% unemployment. But that was starting with 4.2% unemployment which he was left by Barack Obama. After three years he improved that by 0.7%. Kudos.
However, during the pandemic, unemployment skyrocketed to 14.7% and eventually cool back down to 6.5% when he finally left office. After building up 6 Million jobs during his first 3 years, he lost 8 Million in the last one leaving him with a totally negative of 2.5 Million jobs for his total four years, which is the worst record since Herbert Hoover in the Great Depression.
And while we’re romanticizing about grocery prices - remember when the shelves were empty of toilet paper?
Trump ignored the use of masks and distance as a protective measure — as a result, he gave Covid to at least 8 people during the Amy Comey Barret event in the Rose Garden.
President Donald Trump’s campaign rallies led to more than 30,000 coronavirus cases, according to a new paper posted by researchers at Stanford.
Researchers looked at 18 Trump rallies held between June 20 and Sept. 22 and analyzed Covid-19 data the weeks following each event. They compared the counties where the events were held to other counties that had a similar trajectory of confirmed Covid-19 cases prior to the rally date. Out of the 18 rallies analyzed, only three were indoors, according to the research.
The researchers found that the rallies ultimately resulted in more than 30,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19. They also concluded that the rallies likely led to more than 700 deaths, though not necessarily among attendees.
In the end, Trump’s failure to act and feckless action resulted in a greater death count from Covid in America than in any other nation on Earth. If we had only lost as many people as the average nation — thousands of people would still be alive.
Two years into the pandemic, the coronavirus is killing Americans at far higher rates than people in other wealthy nations, a sobering distinction to bear as the country charts a course through the next stages of the pandemic.
The ballooning death toll has defied the hopes of many Americans that the less severe Omicron variant would spare the United States the pain of past waves. Deaths have now surpassed the worst days of the autumn surge of the Delta variant, and are more than two-thirds as high as the record tolls of last winter, when vaccines were largely unavailable.
With American lawmakers desperate to turn the page on the pandemic, as some European leaders have already begun to, the number of dead has clouded a sense of optimism, even as Omicron cases recede. And it has laid bare weaknesses in the country’s response, scientists said.
“Death rates are so high in the States — eye-wateringly high,” said Devi Sridhar, head of the global public health program at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, who has supported loosening coronavirus rules in parts of Britain. “The United States is lagging.”
[…]
The resulting American death toll has set the country apart — and by wider margins than has been broadly recognized. Since Dec. 1, when health officials announced the first Omicron case in the United States, the share of Americans who have been killed by the coronavirus is at least 63 percent higher than in any of these other large, wealthy nations, according to a New York Times analysis of mortality figures.
If about 63% of our covid deaths had bean avoided, that would have been well over 550,000 people.
Let’s recall that this all happened because Trump threw out the Pandemic Playbook that had been crafted by the Obama Administration and immediately ran into problems providing PPE to first responders.
The Trump administration, state officials and even individual hospital workers are now racing against each other to get the necessary masks, gloves and other safety equipment to fight coronavirus — a scramble that hospitals and doctors say has come too late and left them at risk. But according to a previously unrevealed White House playbook, the government should’ve begun a federal-wide effort to procure that personal protective equipment at least two months ago.
“Is there sufficient personal protective equipment for healthcare workers who are providing medical care?” the playbook instructs its readers, as one early decision that officials should address when facing a potential pandemic. “If YES: What are the triggers to signal exhaustion of supplies? Are additional supplies available? If NO: Should the Strategic National Stockpile release PPE to states?”
The strategies are among hundreds of tactics and key policy decisions laid out in a 69-page National Security Council playbook on fighting pandemics, which POLITICO is detailing for the first time. Other recommendations include that the government move swiftly to fully detect potential outbreaks, secure supplemental funding and consider invoking the Defense Production Act — all steps in which the Trump administration lagged behind the timeline laid out in the playbook.
Trump has touted that he “fought for America” but in reality efforts like his tariffs with China resulted in losing 245,000 jobs for farm workers.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump's trade war with China has caused a peak loss of 245,000 U.S. jobs, but a gradual scaling back of tariffs on both sides would boost growth and lead to an additional 145,000 jobs by 2025, a study commissioned by the U.S.-China Business Council (USCBC) shows.
The group, which represents major American companies doing business in China, said the study by Oxford Economics also includes an "escalation scenario" which estimates a significant decoupling of the world's two largest economies could shrink U.S. GDP by $1.6 trillion over the next five years. This could result in 732,000 fewer U.S. jobs in 2022 and 320,000 fewer jobs by 2025, it said.
Lastly, the high oil prices that we saw in 2021-2022 were caused by Donald Trump making an arrangement with OPEC+ to cut their oil production rates.
WASHINGTON/LONDON/DUBAI (Reuters) - As the United States pressed Saudi Arabia to end its oil price war with Russia, President Donald Trump gave Saudi leaders an ultimatum.
In an April 2 phone call, Trump told Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that unless the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) started cutting oil production, he would be powerless to stop lawmakers from passing legislation to withdraw U.S. troops from the kingdom, four sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The threat to upend a 75-year strategic alliance, which has not been previously reported, was central to the U.S. pressure campaign that led to a landmark global deal to slash oil supply as demand collapsed in the coronavirus pandemic - scoring a diplomatic victory for the White House.
Trump delivered the message to the crown prince 10 days before the announcement of production cuts. The kingdom’s de facto leader was so taken aback by the threat that he ordered his aides out of the room so he could continue the discussion in private, according to a U.S. source who was briefed on the discussion by senior administration officials.
There wasn’t any of these situations that Trump didn’t botch.
Sure gas prices and grocery prices were cheaper before the GLOBAL PANDEMIC which caused worldwide inflation. But that pandemic wouldn’t have been as bad, if not for Trump. Gas prices wouldn’t have grown as high, if not for Trump. The protests that happened wouldn’t have been as violent, if not for Trump. Neo-Nazis wouldn’t have been as emboldened, if not for Trump. The Afghan Army and government wouldn’t have collapsed - if not for Trump. The Iran deal would have remained in place - if not for Trump. The Paris Accords would have remained — if not for Trump.
No one would have attacked the Capitol if not for Trump. Millions wouldn’t have lost their jobs if not for Trump. And hundreds of thousands of Americans would be alive, if not for Donald Trump.
He can’t be allowed a chance to cause this kind of carnage yet again.
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