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WASHINGTON President Donald Trump has dismissed advice from allies urging him to tone down his rhetoric and held back so far on making a formal address to the nation as cities across the country faced another night of protest over the death of George Floyd.

As the roar of police helicopters and chanting crowds reverberated through the White House grounds for a third night, Trump again opted against making prime-time remarks from the Oval Office, as other presidents have done in times of domestic crisis.

Instead, he spent the day on Twitter, doubling down on a strategy of calling for stronger police tactics, a move critics say is only worsening the situation.

Trumps advisers have been divided over what role the president should take in responding to the widest unrest the country has seen in decades. Some say Trump should focus his message on Floyd, the black man who died last week at the hands of Minneapolis police, and urge calm. Others say the top priority is stopping the violence and looting that have taken place in some areas, arguing that the best path to that end is strong police tactics, not presidential speeches.

Live updates on George Floyd's death and protests around the country.

Jared Kushner, Trump's senior adviser and son-in-law, is not in favor of a high-profile presidential speech at this time, according to a person close to the White House.

Some Trump allies agree. It doesnt matter how brilliant an Oval Office address President Trump gives, that isnt going to make a difference to people financially, and the real issue is the economy, said Jason Miller, a former campaign communications adviser.

A formal address would only set Trump up for failure, Miller argued. "Its so easy to say he didnt strike the perfect chord, or left out this detail," he said. "There are only various levels of failure that could result.

But a second camp in Trumps inner circle has been calling on him to tone down his strong-arm law-and-order rhetoric. This group includes Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., who said he spoke to the president on Saturday and called his tweets not constructive.

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I told him what Im going to tell you, which is, Mr. President, it helps us when you focus on the death, the unjustified, in my opinion, the criminal death of George Floyd, Scott said Sunday in a Fox News interview. Those tweets are very helpful, it is helpful when you say what you said yesterday, which is that its important for us to recognize the benefits of nonviolent protests.

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There is broad agreement among Trumps allies and closest aides that his current, largely incendiary messaging on protesters could backfire politically and also potentially further fuel the turmoil.

The presidents advisers warned Trump this weekend that while the election is still five months away, there is a risk that some of his language could alienate key voters such as moderates and suburban women.

Those same counselors told the president that his tweets on Thursday which included the phrase when the looting starts, the shooting starts were particularly inflammatory and ill-advised.

Trump has at times softened his rhetoric over the past few days to express some empathy with protesters, saying Friday during an event with business executives on the coronavirus that "I understand the hurt. I understand the pain. People have really been through a lot.

In remarks following a visit to view the SpaceX rocket launch in Florida on Saturday, Trump said the death of Floyd had filled Americans all over the country with horror, anger and grief."

The protests have become increasingly real for Trump and White House staffers over the last 72 hours. On Friday, the president was taken by Secret Service to the underground bunker that then-Vice President Dick Cheney used during the Sept. 11 attacks. Trump stayed less than an hour out of an abundance of caution, according to a senior administration official.

White House staffers were told over the weekend not to come to the White House complex unless absolutely necessary, though no directive had yet been given for Monday, said a White House aide.

Still, Trump has carried on an appearance of business as usual. With cities still smoldering, Trump went to Florida Saturday afternoon to watch SpaceX, the countrys first commercially manned rocket launch, an event the White House planned to use to tout American innovation and the economy. When asked by reporters if he considered calling off the trip, Trump said he felt he had an obligation to be there.

After protests turned violent in Minneapolis on Thursday night, Trump did not sway from his planned Friday remarks outlining actions his administration was taking against China. The Rose Garden event, his first public comments of the day, included no mention of the protests, and the president surprised staff by choosing not to take questions from reporters. It wasnt until a second event later in the afternoon that he noted the events of the preceding night.

Nor did he let the massive scale of the protests sweeping across the country change the messaging he has used during past demonstrations. He again blamed Democrats for unrest, and dismissed the protestors as professionally managed, describing them as a lot of radical-left bad people. His solution, rather than urging calm, has been to push for a stronger police crackdown and a bigger National Guard presence.

Trump has had a pattern during past crises of being slow to divert from his agenda and planned talking points. The weekend before he declared the coronavirus pandemic a national emergency, he was golfing and holding fundraisers at his Mar-a-Lago resort downplaying the severity of the virus. During the controversy around his comments on the deadly protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, Trump spent the weekend at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf course, holding a meeting on tax cuts at the White House and traveling to Trump Tower in New York for a meeting on infrastructure as the controversy ballooned.

But while Trump has been heavily criticized over his response to the protests, the demonstrations provide him the type of culture war distraction he had been seeking to take the focus away from his administrations response to the coronavirus, which has killed more than 100,000 people and resulted in 1 in 4 Americans filing for unemployment, said one outside adviser.

Before the demonstrations escalated, Trump had little success trying to shift the national conversation away from the coronavirus pandemic to other divisive issues popular with conservatives, such as voter fraud, alleged social media bias and China. Now, says that adviser, he can appear as the strong-arm law-and-order candidate protecting the country from lawlessness.

His campaign is watching closely and already looking for ways to turn the demonstrations against Joe Biden, the apparent Democratic nominee, by questioning whether the former vice president supports Trumps move to designate antifa, a group of far-left activists, a terrorist organization.

"President Trump has been fighting culture wars since he announced his candidacy in 2015, said Garrett Ventry, a former Republican Senate aide. The president believes that it is a win when he engages in these fights. It ignites his base.

But as one outside adviser stressed, the national turmoil this weekend also highlights the divisive nature of the presidents politics at a time when he and his re-election campaign could really use some uniter in chief and healer in chief type headlines.

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Trump dismissing advice to tone down rhetoric, address the nation - NBC News

This piece is a commentary, part of The Appeals collection of opinion and analysis.

Over the weekend, as massive protests against police violence unfolded in cities across America, President Trump watched from the White House and worked himself into a howling, bloodthirsty rage.

When the looting starts, the shooting starts, he declared in a tweet, three days after a white Minneapolis officer killed George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man arrested for allegedly passing a fake $20 bill, by kneeling on his neck for almost nine minutes. At one point, he applauded the National Guard for having stopped [looters] cold in Minnesota, as if he had just watched a football team make a particularly impressive goal-line stand; at another, he wistfully opined that the NYPD should be allowed to do their jobpresumably, in his mind, also stopping people cold. He retweeted a conservative radio hosts ominous prediction as an implicit threat: This isnt going to stop until the good guys are willing to use overwhelming force against the bad guys.

This president has long expressed a peculiar appreciation for authoritarian power and physical force. He is famously intolerant of anything over which he cannot exert control and incapable of viewing dissenterseven protesters challenging a shameful legacy of state-sanctioned racist violenceas anything other than enemies to crush underfoot. While the country tries to grapple with police brutality, perhaps more meaningfully than ever before, its chief executive is a man who openly and unapologetically endorses it.

Trump himself has little power over the day-to-day administration of law enforcement, which falls mostly to state and local authorities: governors, mayors, sheriffs. But the influence of the presidents bully pulpit is nonetheless significant, and on Monday morning, he took the nations governors to task, dismissing them as weak and urging them to dominate the protesters he watched on TV. You have to do retribution, he said, softening his apparent support for summary executions to stump for harsh mandatory minimums instead. You have to arrest people, and you have to try people, and they have to go to jail for long periods of time. Sentences of five to 10 years, he suggested, should be sufficient.

Then, in an unhinged Rose Garden address that evening, a fed-up Trump promised a crackdown, exhorting mayors and governors to dominate the streets with an overwhelming law enforcement presence in the days to come. As police on horseback fired rubber bullets and tear gas in nearby Lafayette Park, he proclaimed himself the president of law and order and threatened to deploy the militaryan institution that he does controlto quickly solve the problem for cities or states that dont do so to his satisfaction. It is hard to characterize this screed as anything other than a declaration of war on the people he ostensibly governs.

This sort of fervent cheerleading for raw power and military might is not new for Trump. In speeches, he has bemoaned the hostility against our police, and lashed out at laws that are horrendously stacked against them. He praised a Republican congressional candidate who body-slammed a reporter as my type of guy, and complained that the Geneva Conventions make U.S. soliders afraid to fight, and called for embracing torture methods that are a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding. While addressing a room full of law enforcement personnel in 2017, Trump encouraged themwhile laughing, but not jokingto be rough with people they throw into the backs of squad cars.

In his Rose Garden speech on Monday, Trump called himself an ally of all peaceful protesters, but history shows that he is no less enthusiastic about persecuting acts of civil disobedience. He referred to Black athletes kneeling during the national anthem as sons of bitches, turning quiet protests of police killings into a new front in his perpetual culture wars. On the campaign trail, he offered to pay the legal fees of rallygoers who attacked protesters, and occasionally fantasized about punching them himself, pining for the old days when they would have been carried out on a stretcher.

In a 1990 interview, he expressed awe at how ruthlessly the Chinese government crushed a series of student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square a year earlier. They were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength, he said. That shows you the power of strength. The exact number of victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre remains unknown, but has been estimated to be as high as 10,000.

The presidents gleeful fascination with official displays of brute force also surfaced last weekend, when he marveled at the tactical precision of Secret Service agents as they maintained the White Houses perimeter. Whenever someone got too frisky or out of line, they would quickly come down on them, harddidnt know what hit them, he mused.

If anyone had managed to breach the fence, Trump added for good measure, they would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen. Thats when people would have been really badly hurt, at least. To be clear, he was not insinuating that this would be an outcome hed regret.

Three-plus years into his administration, it is beyond clear that Donald Trump has no interest in doing the work of governing traditionally associated with the position he occupies. For him, being president is simply a chance to play an important person on television, eternally in search of the respect that eluded him in his careers as a reality TV personality, golf resort developer, and failed steak magnate.

What this means, in practice, is that when faced with a genuinely difficult problem, like a real-time reckoning with centuries of unchecked police violence against people of color, Trump has no earthly idea what to do next. I am not speculating here; while cities burned on Sunday, he and his team were said to have decided he should not address the nation because he had, as the Washington Post put it, nothing new to say, and no tangible policy or action to announce yet. This is about as damning as an indictment of a leaders competence can get.

So, when he finally decided the images on cable news were too much for a president of the United States to remain silent, Trump fell back on the one impulse with which he has always felt comfortable: unleashing the power of the state against those he sees as enemies, hoping to meet the uncertainty of the moment with the certainty of force. If protesters will not go home, arrest them. If they come back the next day, put them in prison. And if more take their place, governors willing to call in the National Guardand maybe a president eager to see troops marching through the streetscan solve the problem in short order.

Conveniently for him, his preferred brand of lazy authoritarianism dovetails nicely with this countrys tradition of militarized policing, which defines success primarily in terms of inflicting violence, and its obsession with punishment and incarceration, which provides a ready-made infrastructure for incapacitating dissidents. Law enforcement agencies have received billions of dollars worth of military gear over the last several decades, flooding communities with weapons designed for combat and turning city blocks into miniature battlefields. The U.S. incarcerates some 2.3 million people in more than 7,000 jails, prisons, and other facilities, and roughly half a million of them havent been convicted of anything. If this country isnt yet a police state, the tools that could be used to make it one have long been in place.

Among the many troubling implications of Donald Trumps logic is that it contains no obvious limiting principle: Pitting police and civilians against one another like this, over and over, will eventually lead to more officers killing more people. When it happens, it wont matter whether the victims were looters and rioters on one hand or gathered peacefully to remember the life of George Floyd on the other, because in Trumps eyes, crime and dissent are equally wicked and equally worthy of retribution. Violence has no place in American society, unless the perpetrator is wearing a badge and riot gear, in which case the system is working exactly as it should.

Jay Willis is a senior contributor at The Appeal.

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For Trump, There Is No Policing Without Violence - The Appeal

Wheeler needs to finish with more than 50% of the vote in order to win a second term outright in the primary.

PORTLAND, Ore. Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler has a big lead in early returns, but it remains unclear if he'll finish with the support needed to win a second term in Tuesday's primary. Wheeler needs to finish with more than 50% of the vote in order to win a second term outright.

If he doesn't, Wheeler, and the candidate that receives the second-most votes, who is Sarah Iannarone, will be in a runoff in the November general election.

Wheeler faced tremendous pressures in his first four years in office, from his handling of the Portland Police Bureau, to homelessness and culture wars.

He went up against a number of credible candidates, among them Iannarone, who finished third in the 2016 and had no intention of being swept aside in 2020.

She sued Wheeler following an Oregon Supreme Court ruling for receiving large campaign violations that violated a city law passed by voters in 2018. The suit came just after an Oregon Supreme Court decision upholding such laws.

During the campaign, Wheeler was called out for claiming endorsements that were not true, among them support from the Thorns and Timbers and City Commissioner Chloe Eudaly.

In a final indignity, the city auditor fined Wheeler $500 the day before the primary for having donor information on his campaign mailers so small it could not be read.

The Oregonian asked each of candidates to respond to a series of key policy questions. Read their answers here.

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Portland mayor election results: Wheeler with big lead, but November runoff possible - KGW.com

Late last week, as she was leading the charge to push the Democrats $3 trillion pandemic relief package through the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi strode the floor of the capitol in a fuchsia pantsuit, red pumps, white shell and a coordinated red, white and green cherry-print face mask.

This was the day after Ms. Pelosi had stood at a podium for a news conference in a black dress with a complementary dark green and white foliage-print face mask which was itself not long after she had appeared in a shell-pink pantsuit with a matching shell-pink mask.

Hillary Clinton took note, posting a photo on Instagram with the caption: Leader of the House majority, and of mask-to-pantsuit color coordination. The post has been liked more than 250,000 times.

Since late April, when she began wearing silk scarves that were color-coordinated with her suits and shells orange and orange, blue and blue and cream and brown and that she had worn bandanna-style around her face, Ms. Pelosi has also modeled a purple suit with a purple/blue, black and white geometric face mask and a white suit and blue shirt with the same.

And though it would be easy to categorize Ms. Pelosis masks as fun! and all about self-expression! and yes fashion!(as many style watchers have done), her track record and the way her approach contrasts with those around her suggests something more nuanced though the stratagem is covered, natch, by the accessibility of patterned cloth, the kind we all have to wear and to which we can all relate.

After all, why simply don a face mask when you can also use it to make a political point?

Indeed, the sheer variety of her masks stands out like a beacon amid her sea of aides in generic white or blue medical masks and her dark-masked protective detail. It suggests a commitment to consciously choosing a mask every single day that, more than simply demonstrating good mask habits, civic awareness and solicitude for those around her, or even support for small businesses, demands attention. (Many of her masks come from Donna Lewis, a small store in Alexandria, Va., where she also buys some of her suits; for each mask sold, one is donated to Johns Hopkins hospitals.)

As the president continues to eschew the mask in his public appearances over the weekend he went without one when meeting in the Rose Garden with Girl Scouts and small business leaders Ms. Pelosi is making her mask-wearing, and the contrast with those around her, impossible to ignore. Doing so is a constant reminder of the difference between the heads of the executive and legislative branches.

Official Washington may have come relatively late to this particularly emotive symbol of the contemporary culture wars, but it has now fully arrived.

Ms. Pelosi is not the first government official to match her masks to her outfit. That honor goes to the Slovakian president, Zuzana Caputova, whose image went viral in late March at the swearing in of her new coalition government when she wore a burgundy face mask that coordinated perfectly with her burgundy sheath dress. And, apparently, she instructed her new cabinet to wear identical masks (blue) and gloves (white) for the group photo, hence both distinguishing herself from the group and creating a perfectly harmonious picture of civic care.

Likewise, Emmanuel Macron donned a navy mask with a discreet red, white and blue grosgrain ribbon at the side to match his navy suit and little red, white and blue lapel pin on a visit to a school earlier this month.

Melania Trump, too, matched her basic white face mask to her basic white shirt when she appeared in her PSA for mask-wearing in early April. As did Ivanka Trump, who wore a black mask with a black jumpsuit to tour a Maryland produce distributor last week (though that mask had the effect of making her look unsettlingly like a movie bank robber, despite the little American flag pin on the side).

And though most of Congress has now been converted to mask-wearing, as the recent Senate hearings on Covid-19 revealed, with Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina modeling a University of North Carolina booster mask and Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, a red-and-black tie-dye bandanna. Still, they mostly seem to have resorted to the gimmick mask, the current equivalent of the gimmick tie (see also Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and his Washington Nationals mask), the patriot mask (Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina in a stars and stripes and eagles number) or the OK-Ill wear-it-if-I-have-to face mask that Vice President Mike Pence wore when he visited the General Motors and Ventec ventilator production plant in Indiana last month.

But no other elected official has embraced the mask with as much relentless and considered eye-catching range as Ms. Pelosi.

In this her resolve is fully in line with the Speakers approach to image-making, which has always involved every tool at her disposal, be it a clapback at the State of the Union or her Speakers mace pin. She understands that there are ways to make herself and her positions heard even when she isnt saying anything at all. That at a time when almost all communication is taking place within the confines of a small box, these kinds of details matter.

Continued here:
The Many Masks of Nancy Pelosi - The New York Times

Eminems second major-label album was a compelling but lurid whodunit. The Marshall Mathers LP wasnt a murder mystery, per se, though plenty of characters met their demise. It was a mystery of realness.

This remained a hip-hop conundrum 20 years ago especially after the still-unsolved deaths of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. Were rappers real or fake? If you claimed to be a product of the drug trade, had you actually moved weight? After Eminems unprecedented success for a white rapper, via The Slim Shady LP in 1999 and its follow-up, questions abounded. Was he a prankster, an industry plant, a generational voice? (The last was asserted in 2003 by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney). Were his lyrics truth or fantasy? Was he a public danger?

These days, a rappers rhymes are rarely more than a Twitter trending topic. But in 2000, multitudes were engrossed: a United States Senate committee about entertainment and violence (where vice-presidential wife Lynne Cheney said Eminem advocates murder and rape); feminist and gay activists; parents groups and religious activists.

In the often very catchy pop songs of The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem got into it with all these people, plus his family, other musicians (famous or obscure), celebrities and the media. As a result, virtually every bystander had an opinion cocked, locked and ready to rock, to quote another Motor City madman, Ted Nugent. Eminem was a one-man internet before the internet really became the internet.

With his troika of identities Marshall Mathers, Eminem, Slim Shady appearing together for the first time, multisyllabic mockery, metrical slaloms of disdain and lots of funny voices, he exorcised trauma like a street magician flourishing cards, lyrics whirring around your ears. In 2020, having gone platinum 10 times, The Marshall Mathers LP hits differently. But its still a vivid snapshot of the late culture wars, when a foul-mouthed white rapper was our worst public health scare.

All music previews and full tracks provided by Spotify. Warning: Many tracks contain strong language.

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Eminem's 'The Marshall Mathers LP': Hear What Came Before and After - The New York Times