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Spaniards are getting really worked up about Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. At one point last month, the defaced image of the photogenic Socialist was plastered across a giant red banner hung in downtown Madrid.

The trigger has been his widely-criticized handling of the coronavirus pandemic that has seen Spain suffer among the highest death tolls in Europe. But as the worst of the trauma starts to fade, the vitriol has only gotten worse.The opposition is stirringlegitimate criticism with paranoia, crackpot conspiracy theories and ancient resentments into a toxic brew.

The country is emergingfrom itsthree-month lockdown now. Butthe backlash in the capitalis growing one penthouse has been raining down anti-government leaflets on protesters gathered in the street below.

The anger is palpable on social media feeds and in parliament, where 48-year-old Sanchez scraped together enough votes to extend his state-of-emergency powers this week with the furious opposition dredging up his coalition partners ties to Venezuela to paint the prime minister as a wannabe authoritarian.

Were fighting for Spain, said Jose Luis Marin as he led a few dozen pan-banging marchers through one of the capitals swankiest neighborhoods. He was brandishing a 3-meter long Spanish flag with the word Libertad freedom scrawled across it.

In truth, tensions were always bubbling under the surface and the virus has simply turned up the temperature in Spains long-running culture wars. Broad swathes of the population questioned Sanchezs legitimacy from the moment he took office.

Im fascinated by the absolute hatred for Pedro Sanchez in certain parts of the right, Roger Senserrich, a political scientist based in New Haven, Connecticut, observed on Twitter. Hes a pretty normal politician, mediocre in almost everything, just as ambitious as any other leader of a national party and probably just as (in)competent. But my god, the hatred. Its brutal.

A spokesman for the prime minister declined to comment.

Spain is a young democracy that emerged from a military dictatorship in late 1970s to become one of Europes most thriving and socially liberal economies and yet its politics remain fiercely partisan with sharp ideological fault lines reminiscent of the US under Donald Trump or Boris Johnsons Brexit Britain.

Sanchez is just as polarizing. That makes it almost impossible to imagine how its politicians will find common cause as it seeks a path out of a devastating recession.

The right always tends to be very personal in its attacks, saidIgnacio Urquizu, a sociologist and former Socialist lawmaker. It focuses on the leader.

The images from the US over the past week show how quickly order can break down when you put together longstanding divisions, acute economic hardship and a burning sense of injustice. To be sure, Spain has seen nothing like the Black Lives Matter protests as yet, but it has some of the same ingredients. And a few of its own.

For many of the conservative voters who make up about a third of the Spanish electorate, Sanchezs original sin was to forge an alliance with the radical left group Podemos and the separatists of Catalonia and the Basque Country.

Those groups came together in a 2018 no-confidence vote to oust the center-right Peoples Party, which had been limping along since losing its majority three years earlier.

Conservatives objected, with some justification, that Sanchez was lining up with lawmakers that wanted to undermine Spains constitutional order or, in the case of the Catalans, had actually tried to break up the country. They say his willingness to cut deals with those groups now to keep his minority coalition in power betrays his lack of scruples.

Theyve watched too many TV shows like Game of Thrones and House of Cards, says PP official Javier Fernandez-Lasquetty, economy chief for the Madrid region. Thats not how politics works in real life.

Parliamentary rules require any no-confidence motion to propose an alternative premier, so itshighly unlikely the PP can force Sanchez out.

All the same, at the start of the pandemic there was a moment of national unity. When Sanchez declared the state of emergency in March, not even the far-right group Vox voted against him.

It didnt last.

Spain has been in the grip of a slow-motion constitutional crisis since 2015. Four general elections in that period have failed to produce even one stable executive, stirring up memories and grudges from the Civil War almost a century ago. The virus eventually made all that worse.

With the PP controling Madrid, which has been at the epicenter of the outbreak, the tensions have been focused in the capital.

When Sanchez started to lift restrictions in the rest of the country, Madrid and Barcelona were kept under lockdown and resentments started to build. Regional leaders saidthat the governments criteria were neither transparent nor objective.

It was a pure show of force, Lasquetty said in an interview. Madridfelt mistreated. That explains what happened in May.

As relations unraveled, Madrid President Isabel Diaz Ayuso turned up an hour and a half late for one appointment with Sanchez and walked out of another. When the state of emergency expires on June 21, she will have much more control over the next phase of the capitals reopening.

Sanchez is losing his special powers at a moment when hes struggling for control on various fronts.

On top of the backlash on the streets, the prime minister has found himself embroiled in a fight with the Civil Guard, the countrys biggest police force. One of the forces most senior officerswas fired after it emerged that his officers had prepared a report critical of the governments handling of the coronavirus, prompting cries of interference.

Meanwhile protesters have been openly defying the terms of the lockdown. Those actions that have led to tens of thousands of fines in the rest of the country. But police in Madrid have on the whole turned a blind eye, perhaps wary of inflaming the situation.

If the economic situation gets worse, there is a chance that it may all expand beyond Madrid, says Urquizu.

The opposition is doing all it can to fan the flames and Pablo Iglesias, deputy prime minister and Podemoss leader, is a lightning rod. The scruffy former academic, nicknamed derisively the Ponytail in reference to his trademark long hair, spent time in Caracas advising the Hugo Chavez government before setting up his party.

When the 41-year-old first took his seat in parliament, he provocatively planted a kiss full on the mouth of a male colleague right in front of the conservative economy chief Luis de Guindos, to roars of approval from his party.

In a heated debate in parliament last week, the PPs main spokeswoman Cayetana Alvarez de Toledo dredged up Iglesiass links to the left-wing government that has ravaged Venezuela for a generation. Alvarez de Toledo, an Oxford-educated aristocrat with an exotic-sounding Argentinian accent in Spanish, said the government is seeking to undermine independent state-institutions by appointing cronies and labeled Iglesias the son of a terrorist a reference to his fathers activism during the dictatorship.

You have a plan, its true, its a plan against democracy, Alvarez de Toledo, 45, said. You want to create an authoritarian left-wing regime.

Those arguments mutate as they filter through the protests on the streets of the capital where angry, confused people are trying to process the events of the past few months.

They have done it badly on purpose, said Carmen Corbera, at one protest, a Spanish flag stitched onto the side of her face mask and another pinned to her shoulders like a cape. It was convenient for them to establish the communist regime that Pedro and Pablo want for Spain.

To be clear, there is zero evidence either that the pandemic was deliberately mishandled, or that the government is plotting to set up a communist regime.

A Chavista takeover is not the real threatfor Spain.

The danger is that the countrys entrenched political factions are increasingly inhabiting parallel realities and leaving the country unable to face its mounting challenges. The lines at food banks are growing and in the weeks to come more and more people are likely to be sitting at home, out of work, and looking for someone to blame.

Spain needs a prime minister to revive the battered economy, to stabilize the public finances and then get to work on the difficult process of fixing the democratic system.

But like millions of his countrys people, Sanchez is just trying to get to the end of the month.

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Rage against Spain PM Pedro Sanchez is tearing the nation apart - Hindustan Times

It is advisable to tread lightly when wandering around the minefields of todays culture wars.

Nonetheless, I felt on solid ground in mocking the attempt by Donald Trumps callow press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, to compare her boss to Winston Churchill.

She suggested that Trumps photo op on the steps of St. Johns Episcopal Church, across from the White House, was a leadership moment that ranked with the British prime minister visiting the East End of London during the Blitz in the Second World War.

A moments reflection might have spotted the flaws in her logic.

Trumps trip to the church was only possible after Lafayette Square was cleared of peaceful protesters by security forces using rubber bullets and smoke canisters.

That showed a message of resilience and determination, said McEnany. Like Churchill, we saw him inspecting the bomb damage and that sent a powerful message to the British people.

Proof, if any were required, Trumps self-image is 10 per cent vanity and 90 per cent delusion.

In thought and language, the two men are in different universes.

The president could only dream of a put-down as devastating as Churchills description of obdurate U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles as Dull, Duller, Dulles.

When Churchill visited the East End of London in September 1940, he was followed by large crowds but they were adoring, not belligerent.

I suggested on social media that the comparison was ludicrous; that where Churchill brought encouragement and hope, Trump brings fear, mistrust and hate.

It seemed incontrovertible, like the flow rate of the Ottawa River or the irrelevance of the federal NDP.

But I had innocently roamed into an overlapping Venn diagram of political outrage, only to find my mild indignation at Trump surpassed by the fury of the Churchill-haters.

Journalist Murad Hemmadi said Churchill advocated gassing Indians rebelling against the British Raj in 1919. He was backed by a number of others, one of whom pointed out Churchill signed off on terms at Yalta that consigned tens of millions to Soviet rule.

We were quickly back into the debate that erupted three years ago when the Ontario elementary teachers federation wanted to remove Sir John A. Macdonalds name from public schools.

The comparisons with Churchill are apt.

There are schools bearing his name in at least 10 Canadian cities, as well as dozens of statues. Are we on the brink of an anti-Churchill backlash and demands to see his name stripped from public places?

When the Macdonald controversy was in full swing, Hemmadi wrote an article for Macleans that claimed challenges to the present version of the past were not attempts to erase it, but to make it more complete.

The mission is not to exclude certain people but to more accurately remember them and to re-write peoples who have been purposely excluded from that story into it, he said.

He called Churchill a lionized villain and said marginalized groups are not intent on throwing great men down George Orwells memory hole, but rather on pulling the misdeeds and crimes of those leaders up out of it.

But has any leader been more closely scrutinized, and found more wanting at various stages of his 55-year career in public life than Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill?

He has been roundly criticized for his views on racial hierarchies and eugenics. He did call for gas to be used against uncivilized tribes, though it was closer to tear gas than mustard gas. He was prime minister at the time of the Bengal famine in 1943, when an estimated three million people died and the sub-continent was still exporting rice to the rest of the British Empire. His only possible defence was that he was pre-occupied by the war in Europe.

Churchill considered Gandhi a bad man and an enemy of the Empire and was unperturbed by the prospect of his death. He was widely blamed for the Dardanelles disaster in the First World War, which saw him demoted as First Lord of the Admiralty and consigned to the trenches on the Western Front.

It doesnt need marginalized groups to dig up Churchills misdeeds and mistakes generations of historians have already done their work.

His idiosyncrasies mean he is hard to pin down. As a Conservative, he has been demonized by the left but as biographer Roy Jenkins, the former British Labour minister, noted, he held a lively sympathy for the underdog, particularly against the middle dog, provided, and it was quite a big proviso, that his own position as top dog was unchallenged. He came from the aristocracy but as a Liberal minister, he had a substantial record as a social reformer, particularly on penal reform.

Societys values are changing, in many ways for the better. So does this mean those who are commemorated should change too?

A committee at Yale University created a framework to examine calls to rename public buildings and landmarks, after an outcry at a college named after an architect of Southern secession.

The committee concluded re-naming depended on the name-sakes legacy and whether his or her views were exceptional for the era.

Churchills legacy is apparent.

The historical record should not be re-written to suit political ends

As the plaque on his likeness at Toronto City Hall proclaims: His faith and leadership inspired free men to fight in every quarter of the globe for the triumph of justice and liberty. My father recalled sitting around the radio with his family in Scotland listening to Churchills wireless addresses, and well remembered their power.

As for Churchills views, he was born a Victorian aristocrat and his attitudes on race, class and Empire were entirely typical of the era.

The times are changing and some people would like to promote an alternative version of history that portrays the values and events they hold dear.

But the historical record should not be re-written to suit political ends.

We have not always been at war with Eastasia.

Churchill was the necessary hero at the most troubled moment in modern history.

And Donald Trump is no Winston Churchill.

Email: jivison@postmedia.com | Twitter:

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John Ivison: Donald Trump is no Winston Churchill, and the comparison is ludicrous - National Post

A doctor speaks about events they think will put public health at risk. Instead of responding with gratitude, political officials seek to silence and discredit the doctor. Is this in China, the United States, Canada or a small Norwegian town in Henrik Ibsens 1882 play An Enemy of the People?

These are extraordinary times that require us to come up with new ways to understand and tackle social, economic and health crises. But we can also look to literary texts to help us engage critically with complex social challenges and guide our thinking.

Ibsens play is a telling example of how revisiting classic literature can offer timely, prescient and compelling insights of enduring value. In the play, the character Dr. Stockmann goes public after he discovers that lucrative baths are polluted with a dangerous bacterium. The wrath of town officials and businessmen is swift and fierce.

In December 2019, Chinas Dr. Li Wenliang and his colleagues were among the first to recognize a dangerous new virus. Li was detained and interrogated by local officials for sharing news of the virus through social media and tragically died from the coronavirus on Feb. 7.

Li became a global symbol for how inconvenient expertise may be silenced, although he was posthumously exonerated. National authorities designated him as a martyr the highest official title that can be assigned to a citizen in China who gives their life in the service of the country.

Recently, on this side of the Pacific Ocean, similar patterns have emerged, minus the martyrdom.

In the U.S., Dr. Rick Bright, director of the Biomedical Advanced Research Development Authority (BARDA), had been presiding over the development of a COVID-19 vaccine and was re-assigned.

Bright filed a whistleblower complaint against the Trump administration, alleging that leaders at the Department of Health and Human Services ignored his COVID-19 early warnings. He also said he was fired because he resisted promoting hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine as cures.

Brights description of a political culture that favours politics and cronyism over science is the latest evidence that American experts and authorities are not insulated from the vulgar and avaricious reach of the Trump administration. And its here that Ibsens classic presents the clearest analogue to this historical moment.

Bright is a respected, mid-career medical authority who held wide influence over U.S. public health policy, in a similar way as Stockmann does in Ibsens fictional Norwegian town. Brights soft-spoken demeanour differs from Stockmanns more abrasive tone, but the two share a commitment to professional integrity, accountability and the public good that put them at odds with political leaders who prioritize profits over human health and safety.

In the play, Stockmann writes an article for the towns newspaper revealing the state of the baths to the public. When the towns mayor gets word of the forthcoming public disclosure, he immediately confronts Stockmann and implores him to reconsider. The mayor promptly informs the doctor that repairs to the baths would have crippling costs, take two years to complete and destroy the towns economy. The mayor desperately offers that perhaps the situation is not as bad as you represent

Stockmann has a disquieting response:

I tell you it is even worse or at all events it will be in summer, when the warm weather comes.

The mayor ultimately uses his connections and influence to stop the articles publication. In the plays climax, Stockmann opts to reveal the truth at a town hall. His message is received poorly by the audience and he is promptly fired and labelled an enemy of the people.

Similarly, Brights recent congressional testimony warned that America faces the darkest winter in recent human history. One key difference is that Brights voice was not silenced by the media. And while Bright lost his job, his testimony has been positively received by the American public.

At the same time, the politicization of the pandemic has rendered him a target of the rights culture wars, as the debate over economic closures, death counts and now mask-wearing intensifies.

Similarly, the right has recently repudiated Dr. Anthony Fauci as an agent of economic destruction. Faucis implicit and explicit rebukes of Trumps erratic reopening plans have attracted the ire of the reactionary right and of the president himself.

Crucially, Trump has repeatedly used the phrase enemy of the people to attack critical journalism; now the same phrase has been heard at an anti-lockdown protest.

Right-wing networks and advocacy groups are also supporting open the economy protests. Some protestors have accused government or hospital authorities of fabricating the crisis and health-care workers of being stand-in actors. Such tactics are akin to excoriating people in public service as enemies of the people.

In Canada, Conservative MP Derek Sloans racist attack on Dr. Theresa Tam, Canadas Chief Public Health Officer, provides another example of the political subversion of expertise that is at the fulcrum of Ibsens play.

Racialized challenges to experts and reopening-the-economy protests dominated by white people who wield guns and hold racist symbols are about re-affirming white supremacy and defending an inequitable and unjust status quo.

Read more: Inquiry into coronavirus nursing home deaths needs to include discussion of workers and race

So, what then can we learn from this 19th-century play about how to move forward?

At the end of the play, Stockmann rededicates himself to education in the hopes of winning future battles for the public good. He announces to his family hell start a progressive school at the site of his public debasement the town hall to teach the next generation to reject the towns petty thinking and corruption.

This is noteworthy. Li, Bright, Fauci and Tam have educated the public through their public commentary, testimony or actions, in addition to providing scientific expertise. Fauci, for instance, has publicly committed to wearing a face mask to model responsible behaviour and Tam has patiently explained evolving guidelines in Canada on wearing masks.

In turn, we all ought to recommit ourselves to formal and informal education that emphasizes responsible citizenship, the value of inclusive but rigorous knowledge and the importance of collaboration and, at times, personal sacrifice in the interest of the common good.

Such steps are essential to resisting the plague of neoliberal economic expediency and competitive individualism that endangers so many aspects of our social and environmental life. And perhaps now is also an ideal time to be reading and teaching more Ibsen.

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It's easy to become an enemy of the people when speaking truth in historic drama, and today - The Conversation CA

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