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In fact, it’s worse than Trump neither mentioning nor even tweeting “Black Lives Matter”– despite tweeting repeatedly “Law & Order,” which has long been viewed as a racist dog whistle by politicians telling white America they will keep them safe from black criminals. During the 2016 campaign,Trump repeatedly slammed Black Lives Matter. For example, in 2015 while on Fox News, Trump stated about the movement, “I think they’re trouble. I think they’re looking for trouble.” He then blasted Democrats for “catering” to the group and for some “apologizing because they say ‘white lives matter’ and ‘all lives matter.'” And in July 2016, just days before Republican National Convention that would formally make him the party’s presidential nominee, Trump again used Fox News to attack Black Lives Matter, accusing them of “dividing America” and slammed its name, “The first time I heard it I said ‘You have to be kidding,'” adding, “I think it’s a very, very, very divisive term.”
Then there’s Trump’s refusal to address what led to the killing of Floyd, namely police brutality and systemic racism. As Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison aptly reminded us on my SiriusXM radio show Friday, when it came to ISIS and al Qaeda, Trump demanded that as a nation we “couldn’t use the word “terrorism” without attaching “Islamic” or “Muslim” to it,” since Trump had said, “To solve a problem, you have to be able to state what the problem is, or at least say the name.” Yet, as Ellison noted, now Trump “doesn’t want to call this what it is.”
While Trump has condemned the specific officers involved in the killing of Floyd as “a terrible insult to police and policemen,” he refuses to address the racism embedded in the nation’s criminal justice system. This isn’t by accident, rather it appears to be the Trump administration’s official position given Attorney General Bill Barr and Acting DHS head Chad Wolf both denying on TV appearances Sunday that there’s “systemic racism” in our criminal justice system. Instead, they seem to believe in essence there are just a few bad apples.
This is stunning given the data that makes it clear our criminal justice system — as a whole — is far from color blind. For example, a 2019 Stanford University study examined over 100 million traffic stops around the country and found that on average black drivers are 20% more likely to get pulled over than white drivers. Other studies have found that black men are nearly three times as likely to be killed than white men when police use force.
Even in sentencing there’s a racial disparity, with a 2017 study concluding that Black men who commit the identical crime as white men receive federal prison sentences on average nearly 20% longer. To reach this level of disparity it needs to be more than a few bad apples — it sounds more like the entire tree is infected with racism.
In contrast, former Vice President Joe Biden stated Saturday in response to George Floyd’s killing that our nation must finally address “systemic racism” and recently called for a police oversight board to address police brutality.
Trump’s reaction to the protests, coming on the heels of the administration’s wildly incompetent handling of the Covid-19 outbreak, adds to the long list of reasons why Trump must go. His threat to send in federal troops to “dominate” and suppress what have been overwhelmingly peaceful protesters drew sharp criticism from a range of former top military officers who typically don’t comment on politics. Even Trump’s former Secretary of Defense James Mattis slammed him for being the first president in his lifetime who has not tried to unite us, but “instead he tries to divide us.”
The massive protests against police brutality and entrenched racism, with the largest ones to date taking place Saturday are reminiscent of the 2017 Women’s March and the protests against Trump’s first Muslim ban (aka travel ban). Those protests not only animated people, but helped pave the way for the 2018 midterm elections where Democrats won the House and, more impressively, received nearly 10 million more votes than Republicans, marking the largest popular vote win for a minority party in a midterm election on record.
Of course black lives matter — and it’s time we had a president who not only said those words but implemented policies to ensure they do. Hopefully, these protests will lay the groundwork for both.
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