The photo-op he wanted

There were another almost 1.9 million new applications for unemployment last week. Meteor Blades, reporting for Daily Kos says there are two sets of numbers put out by the Labor Department, one set is for “seasonally adjusted” and the other not. He gets into why that matters, so I won’t. I’ll just say a lot more people are unemployed.



Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted about the nasty guy photo op from a couple days ago:

Let's be clear about what happened this week at the White House. The photo-op Trump wanted was not just of himself holding a Bible—he wanted footage of Americans who disagree with him being scattered, of violence pushed upon them. That's the photo-op he wanted.

Warren has been at the Black Lives Matter protest in CD for three days. No other Senator has come.



There have been a couple more names proposed for the nasty guy – Bunker King and Bunker Baby. Before he had Lafayette Square cleared a few days ago he had been spending time in the White House bunker. Since then it looks like he is turning the area around the White House into part of his bunker.

Mark Sumner of Kos reports that first a fence was put up that enclosed Lafayette Square. Yeah, the White House already has a pretty significant fence. Then another fence was added a block farther out. And truckloads of fence have arrived in the area. This looks to last longer than the current round of protests. It looks like concrete barricades are also going up. Wrote Sumner:

Trump is so damned terrified of Americans that he is turning the White House into a medieval castle, protected by ring after ring after ring of hardware, and thousands of ranked, armed, and armored warriors, protecting him against … what? Hearing an unpleasant word? Seeing an unflattering sign? Hearing a less-than-supportive chant?

Betsy Klein has a couple videos of the fence. Replying to her Sideline Observer tweeted: “The White Hose is the world’s largest Chicken coop.”

Jake Godin tweeted an image from Google Maps showing where the fence is. It runs along Constitution, 15th St., H St., and 17th St. It encloses both Lafayette Square and The Ellipse.

I went to Google Maps and entered “White House fence” and didn’t get anything useful.



Hunter of Kos looks at the nasty guy’s campaign’s latest offering available for donation. In a letter for “Patriots only” it says:

The President wants YOU and every other member of our exclusive Trump Army to have something to identify yourselves with, and to let everyone know that YOU are the President's first line of defense when it comes to fighting off the Liberal MOB.

It’s one thing to offer “something to identify yourselves” and quite another to put it in such militaristic language. Lots of people are wondering if he’s looking to raise a brownshirt army. More here about brownshirts. Hunter says of the liberal mob:

By which they mean Black Americans and anyone allied with them—anyone who is currently defying Trump, on any street, for any reason.

Calling in the military to subdue protests prompted this quote of the day:

We don’t need police officers who are soldiers. We need police who are guardians.
~~Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2015)

Meteor Blades quotes a study by Maggie Koerth and Jamiles Lartey of FiveThirtyEight which says de-escalation of tension keeps both protesters and police safer. They looked at 50 years of violence at protests, including three federal commissions formed between 1967 and 1970.

All three concluded that when police escalate force — using weapons, tear gas, mass arrests and other tools to make protesters do what the police want — those efforts can often go wrong, creating the very violence that force was meant to prevent.
…
Escalating force by police leads to more violence, not less. It tends to create feedback loops, where protesters escalate against police, police escalate even further, and both sides become increasingly angry and afraid.

Yet police respond with force anyway.



If you’re going to be out on the street in a protest here are some videos on the way to do it – dance protests. In one even the police are joining in.