Does he have a prayer? Donald Trump, George Floyd, and the challenge to America’s character

More than a week has passed since George Floyd was choked to death (or whose body was so overstressed by his ordeal that his heart gave out) due to a Minneapolis policeman’s full body weight on his neck and throat. That was while three other police watched and did nothing to end Floyd’s agonies.

In the days that followed, there have been protests, riots, demonstrations, mounted police charges, rock throwing, and tear gas launching in dozens of cities. Then there have been Rambo-like official exhortations promising the kind of behaviour usually associated with reviled authoritarian regimes, unless the protests come to an end forthwith.

As a result, opprobrium towards the nation’s policing and its leadership (and the country more generally in some circles) has spread nationally, and then around the world on the part of foreign officials and citizens alike. There have also been the inevitable smirks about US racism and police brutality from China, Iran and Russia. Some reasonable, rational people are starting to question whether the US experiment is about to be wound up, with the notation stencilled on the packing crate: “Unsuccessful, return for a do-over”.

Just two weeks ago, a lifetime ago, seemingly all we had to contend with was Donald Trump’s vividly displayed ineptitude and embarrassing,  swaggering incompetence in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite one Trumpian promise, it has stubbornly refused to die out magically in April, and instead, it has already taken the lives of well over 106,000 victims and does not appear to be willing to go away any time soon. Of course, there had also been his comeuppance over supposed miracle drugs that turned out to be useless or, worse, more likely to induce fatal heart conditions than cure the virus. Then there has been all those scarf-teasing reveals about a viable vaccine against the virus, the so-called project “Warp Speed”, as if a magic cure was just around the corner for all those ready arms waiting to be inoculated.

Of course, there has also been the president’s constant bloviating and fulminating about China, Barack Obama, Democrats more generally, the media, experts of almost any stripe, and each of the US’s various allies globally. Special fire has also been levied against inimical international bodies like the WHO.

However, increasingly, much of this bluster has become a low-level, but annoying tinnitus of the body politic. It helps poison public discourse, but it can increasingly be tuned out as utter babel.

As a result, many have simply stopped listening to the noise (unless one wanted to become addicted to antacids and hypertension medication), or taking any real cognisance of its impact. Instead, it is the annoying audio furniture of our time – that is unless you or your nation were the object lesson of his angry slings and arrows. To absorb, digest, and then rebel against every bizarre statement from this president would be enough to drive most people well past “lives of quiet desperation”. Best let the media specialists cataloguing his fibs, lies, and “liar, liar pants on fire” pork pies do their job. And so, for many, his tweets, speeches, rants, and raves have become like some terrible wallpaper in a rented house where the interior decorations can’t be changed, but must be learned to live with. At least until 3 November 2020, that is.

But George Floyd’s death changed things in the US. His death and the aftermath stemming from it pushed the Covid-19 pandemic right off the front pages of major newspapers, chased Covid-19 reporting from its endless coverage on news channels, and even drove it from the conversations of many globally. This one man’s death drove people out into the streets to march and protest, first in Minneapolis, but then in cities across the country, as it drew on reserves of anger about the treatment of African Americans more generally. These protests also gave opportunities for those with violence, property destruction, and looting in their hearts the space to carry this out, again in many cities across the nation. City and state police forces initially found it virtually impossible to contain the violence and several governors eventually called on National Guard units to supplement the overstretched police.

For those not fully familiar with the term “National Guard”, these are men and women who undergo regular military training just as active duty regulars do, but whose Guard units are under the control of the respective states’ governors. Following initial active duty training, these men and women usually go on yearly two-week summer training periods and weekly or monthly training throughout the rest of the year. 

In the current military table of organisation, National Guard units (like regular military reserve units) are supposed to be available to supplement regular active duty personnel and they can be called to active duty for specially designated service, sometimes as part of foreign assignments in places like Iraq. More routinely, they have been called to active duty to assist during major floods, hurricanes, and other natural disasters or, less regularly, to serve as a back-up for state and local police forces coping with civil disorder. (For people the age of this writer, the National Guard, when an opening existed, became a legal way to avoid the very real possibility of being drafted into the regular active duty military and then being sent to Vietnam. Instead, the writer became an infantryman/chef. Really.)

Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, the man who had killed Floyd, Derek Chauvin, and his three accomplices, were all dismissed with immediate effect from the police force and Chauvin was charged with third degree murder and manslaughter. As the demonstrations continued, the prosecution process was removed from the county level and the state’s attorney-general, Keith Ellison, took direct control of the case, and charges are now being placed against the other three former cops as well. Charges against Chauvin have now been raised to second degree murder.

Legal experts explain that first-degree murder charges against a policeman are traditionally very hard to make stick in courts, given the need to prove some serious premedication – preplanning – rather than something that could have happened right at the time of the crime. Regardless, these trials will be among the most closely watched trials in US history – by Americans as well as the rest of the globe – for any signs of leniency towards the former cops, let alone inept trial preparation by the authorities and any evidentiary problems.

The case will inevitably become as big as the OJ Simpson trial did, and maybe the Oscar Pistorius media extravaganza as well. The media will be filled with uncountable hours of commentary by lawyers, social scientists, rabble-rousers, apologists, religious quacks, professional haters, and pretty much anybody else who can find a broadcast or online outlet – any outlet. And millions of people will watch, eager to see if the whole thing becomes just another example of killer cops on the loose, or if such an event actually provokes serious reforms in police training and management, and eventually even in the rebuilding of police-community relations that have been virtually sundered for many in numerous places.

Back in Washington, DC, meanwhile, the president was increasingly agitated as the uproars continued across the country, but most especially as they took place in the streets just across from the White House on Pennsylvania Ave and in Lafayette Square – and beyond. The protesters kept trying to move closer to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, while police forces and Secret Service personnel kept pushing them back beyond a temporary perimeter fence and there were running confrontations, with bottles, bricks, pepper gas, tear gas, flashbangs, and the occasional charge of police mounted on horseback.

This had apparently spooked the president and some of his advisers sufficiently that the president made not one but several “inspection trips” to the bunker below the White House basement. Who really inspects a bunker multiple times in one day, was a question left unexplained. By now, the president and his closest advisers such as, inevitably, his daughter and son-in-law and the attorney-general William Barr, among others, had fashioned on the idea of going across the street, across Lafayette Square, and on to the historic St John’s Church as a show of, well something or other. Barr reportedly gave the order to round ’em up and roust ’em out – the demonstrators, that is.