Even after Donald Trump incited a historic insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in which hundreds of police officers were viciously assaulted, the vice president was threatened with hanging, the building was defaced and vandalized, and the American flag was replaced with a Trump flag, one of Trump’s first acts after taking office a second time was to pardon every last one of the rioters, calling them patriots. All the while, he condemned the police and prosecutors.
As Axios reported at the time, Trump made the decision to do so very thoughtfully:
Eight days before the inauguration, Vice President-to-be JD Vance — channeling what he believed to be Trump’s thinking — said on “Fox News Sunday” that Jan. 6 convicts who assaulted police ought not get clemency: “If you committed violence that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”
Trump vacillated during an internal debate over targeted clemency vs. a blanket decision according to two insiders. But as Trump’s team wrestled with the issue, and planned a shock-and-awe batch of executive orders Day 1, “Trump just said: ‘F**k it: Release ’em all,'” an adviser familiar with the discussions said.
Now, just five months later, Trump has invoked an obscure law to federalize the California National Guard over the objection of the governor and sent active-duty Marines to the streets of Los Angeles in the wake of protests against his mass deportation policy. He declared on Truth Social that “a once great American City, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals […] now violent, insurrectionist mobs are swarming and attacking our Federal Agents to try and stop our deportation operations.” Later, he claimed that the city would have been “obliterated” had he not taken this action, telling reporters that that the protesters are “insurrectionists, they’re bad people” and they “should be in jail.”
His use of the word “insurrection” is telling. He’s not only attempting to defang the term of its political potency, but also to project his own role on Jan. 6 onto Democrats.
As usual, Trump is engaging in histrionics to serve his divide-and-conquer agenda — and to deflect from his own egregious behavior. Only a small part of downtown Los Angeles has been affected by protests. His use of the word “insurrection” is telling. He’s not only attempting to defang the term of its political potency, but also to project his own role on Jan. 6 onto Democrats. He’s out there every day now, bleating about “law and order” and defending the police as if he wasn’t personally responsible for one of the worst attacks on law enforcement in American history. He even has a pithy new slogan: “If they spit, we hit.”
It’s certainly disrespectful to spit in the faces of police officers. But it’s also disrespectful — and much more dangerous — to beat them over the head with flagpoles and, afterwards, proclaim “death is the only remedy.”
Beyond using rhyme to create a new mantra for the right, Trump’s repeated mention of spitting is strategic. It’s designed to reawaken a ghost from the Vietnam era that has proven enduring, despite being repeatedly debunked.
During and after Vietnam, the “spitting myth” was a staple on the right. The trope was that vets coming home from the war were commonly spat upon by war protesters. As it happens, that isn’t quite the truth. As historian Rick Perlstein noted from research for “Nixonland,” his epic history of the period:
In the now-classic study The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, sociologist Jerry Lembcke established that the only actual documented examples of the frequently repeated canard that Americans spat upon returning Vietnam veterans came from the kind of World War II veterans who wouldn’t let their brothers back from Vietnam join local American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars posts because they were seen as shameful, as polluted. (The New York Times reported on the phenomenon here.)
They were the kind of veterans who — Gerald Nicosia tells the story in his history of Vietnam Veterans Against the War — greeted the antiwar veterans who had marched 86 miles from Morristown, New Jersey to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, just like George Washington’s army in 1877.
The World War II veterans heckled them: “Why don’t you go to Hanoi?” “We won our war, they didn’t, and from the looks of them, they couldn’t.” A Vietnam vet hobbled by on crutches. One of the old men wondered whether he had been “shot with marijuana or shot in battle.”
As it turns out, the “law and order” president who pardoned all his supporters who mercilessly beat up cops on Jan. 6 is that same kind of guy. He loves the soldiers in uniform — as long as they toe his line.
On Tuesday, Trump appeared before a group of active-duty soldiers at Fort Bragg, where he gave a nakedly partisan political speech that was filled with lies and conspiracy theories. Ostensibly there to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army, he labeled protesters “animals” and accused them of being part of a “foreign invasion” before pledging to “liberate” Los Angeles. Many of the troops at Fort Bragg seemed to be a receptive audience, booing California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.
These are not the active-duty troops being sent into Los Angeles. The National Guard and Marines are taking care of that. But MSNBC reported on Tuesday that the administration has plans to send tactical units to four Democratic-run cities — New York City, Seattle, Chicago and Philadelphia, — as well as northern Virginia.
The plan is clearly to make Blue America buckle. Trump has already attacked law firms and universities and, in the days before the latest affront to state sovereignty (previously a sacred shibboleth on the right), he threatened to withdraw all federal support for California because of a high school trans athlete being allowed to compete. He will use any excuse to punish and dominate Americans who do not support him.
It’s hard to believe, but it’s only been five months. He’s just getting started.
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