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President Donald Trump
George Floyd and Our Bunker President
How will history remember George Floyd and Donald Trump?
Posted June 24, 2020
George Floyd, whose name we had never heard until May 25, 2020, the day of his death, has inspired Black Lives Matter protests around the world.
George’s friend, Jonathan Veal, recalls a conversation with him at the end of 11th grade in Houston as they discussed their lives after graduation. “George turned to me,” Veal reports, and said, “I want to touch the world” (The New York Times, June 9, 2020).
Floyd achieved this goal—though not in a way he wished for or imagined. His killing, recorded on videotape by a horrified bystander, has exposed the fault line of racism that precedes the founding of this country and has riven it since.
African men and women kidnapped from their native lands and cultures arrived on the Atlantic shore in 1619, long before the American Revolution. As enslaved people, they did not benefit from the noble principles articulated in the 1776 Declaration of Independence, which states “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
I was a middle-class white girl in the 1950s, and my Catholic grade school education taught me tolerance. I believed that the Civil War, which had ended slavery, had eliminated prejudice against “colored people,” as we referred then to anyone who was not white. This belief was not challenged by the instruction I received in American history—neither then nor at the ecumenical high school I attended.
There were no black kids in my neighborhood grade school, nor in my suburban high school, so this construction was hypothetical. Given that I lived in the deeply segregated city of St. Louis, I am shocked now by my ignorance. The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s jump-started my re-education, but the activism it induced (including the landmark 1964 Civil Rights legislation championed by President Lyndon Johnson), ceded to the complacency of the Reagan-Bush years and the apathy of fin-de-siècle politics.
George Floyd has called the world to a new awakening—not only to consciousness but also to action. Protests have continued for nearly a full month and show no signs of abating.
Cities and states have begun passing resolutions banning chokeholds and reviewing how their police departments are funded and how they function. Confederate flags are disappearing in some places and statues of Confederate generals falling. College and University campuses are developing plans to alter their curricula better to reflect our nation’s history as well as to respect the lives and voices of students of color. Congress is considering legislation to address what is now widely perceived as a problem of systemic racism, not only in our law enforcement agencies but also in our country at large.
During this period, President Trump has derided the acts of people he calls “thugs,” “antifa provocateurs,” and “terrorists.” He has authorized or condoned the use of pepper spray and flash bombs to disperse a peaceful crowd in front of the White House so that he could take a power walk to a nearby church for a photo op. He has denied that he was rushed to the White House bunker in fear of his safety. In the aftermath of the Lafayette Square debacle, he ordered (or at least approved) the construction of a concrete and steel fence around the White House grounds. He’d launched his 2016 campaign with a call for a “big, beautiful wall” across the US border with Mexico. Now he had one—around the White House.
In the meantime, he has been behaving as if the COVID-19 crisis is over, despite rising rates of diagnosis and hospitalization in states that reopened early.
What now?
On Saturday, June 20, he held his first pre-election rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, one day after Juneteenth, the day that celebrates the abolition of slavery. Oklahoma may be a red state (hence favorable to Trump), but Tulsa is also the site of the infamous massacre of black citizens and businesses in 1921.
It is possible that Trump was ignorant of the meaning of Juneteenth until alerted by the national press and social media. Yet is it is difficult to imagine that none of his advisors had ever heard of the Tulsa massacre. Or that having been educated about it they were not cognizant of the incendiary nature of holding an election rally there.
I feared a confrontation between protesters and rallygoers, which Trump might then use to promote his "law and order" campaign message. In his call-out to protesters in advance of the rally, he seemed to anticipate such. Fortunately, nothing of that nature occurred. The crowd size was much smaller than expected, and protesters did not interact with attendees.
Trump's focus seems almost exclusively on his reelection: John Bolton, Trump's former National Security Advisor (whose conservative credentials are impeccable) states, "I am hard pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn't driven by reelection calculations" (The Room Where it Happened, Simon and Schuster, 2020, as quoted in The Wall Street Journal).
In a New York Times opinion piece three years ago, psychoanalyst Joel Whitebook connected Trump's habit of lying with the denial of reality that characterizes psychotic thinking. Lacking Whitebook's expertise, I cannot diagnose our president, although I would venture that his embrace of "alternative facts" has only increased over time.
I'm not sure that any statues will be erected to Donald Trump. But the name of George Floyd has entered history. As his 6-year-old daughter, Gianna, said, “My daddy has changed the world.”
