When the protests over George Floyd’s foul death in several states turned violent, including looting, arson and murder, president Trump warned state governors, “If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.”
He made his threat on June 1, at which time twenty-three states and the District of Columbia had activated their National Guard. After his comments in the Rose Garden, he walked over to the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, which rioters had tried to torch the night before, and posed with a Bible.
Two weeks later, the U.S. military has not been deployed, even as Antifa in Seattle has taken over a six-block area in their Capitol Hill neighborhood. As in Minneapolis where police abandoned the 3rd Precinct headquarters, Seattle police gave up their East Precinct, leaving it to rioters who quickly erected barricades and declared it an “autonomous zone,” free of police and any form of recognized government.
Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and members of the John Brown Gun Club (a leftist militia also known as Redneck Revolt) have all helped in the take over, Rapper Raz Simone is the zone’s “warlord,” they’re extorting businesses, and residents are enduring a nightmare.
Seattle’s Democrat mayor, Jenny Durkan, and Washington State’s governor, Jay Inslee, have both downplayed the takeover. Durkan, a radical leftist, compared the takeover to “a block party” rather than “an armed takeover.” Inslee laughed about not knowing that the takeover in Washington’s largest city had even happened.
After the takeover, president Trump tweeted, “Take back your city NOW. If you don’t do it, I will.”
“This is not a game.” True! This is not a game—this is a serious break down in law and order, and the civil authorities in charge are allowing it to happen. And yet, here we are five days later and the president has done nothing. Nada. Zip.
Why not?
I’m afraid the answer may be in who he’s listening to. In an article at American Greatness, Pedro Gonzalez writes that the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, runs the Office of American Innovation (OAI) which “functions as a policy platform through which Kushner promotes personal initiatives and establishment interests.” Unfortunately, Kushner opposes the conservative wing of the White House—”the wing,” he writes, “that got Trump elected.”
With respect to crime and the current rioting, Gonzalez continues (with my emphasis),
Though they did not know it at first, Americans almost immediately became intimately acquainted with Rollins’ Koch-approved approach to crime. Behind the scenes, Rollins and Kushner continue to advise Trump to go soft on those engaged in violence across the country.
“The president has signaled that he would very much like to crack down on rioters,” Carlson said on June 1. “That is his instinct. If you’ve watched him you believe it. But every time he has been talked out of it by Jared Kushner and by aides that Kushner has hired and controlled.” Rollins is one of those aides for whom murder, mayhem, and madness constitute a small price to pay for the reforms that are in the interest of her backers.
If this is true—and there’s no reason to believe it’s not—conservatives are in for a rude awakening. These two examples suggest that Trump is all bluster and no substance when it comes to the unrest we’re experiencing because he’s being reined in by his own family. And blood, as they say, is thicker than water. That can’t be good for his re-election chances in the fall.
You always get more of what you subsidize. Wink at this rebellion, let Antifa declare victory and you’ll get more of it across the country. If Trump is who he says he is—the “law and order president”—he needs to declare an insurrection and send in the military to put down the rebellion. If he doesn’t, who will?