Trump's Ronald Reagan gambit

Donald Trump's chances of reelection are cratering as COVID kills the people he is supposed to be working for. He faces rejection. So he, and his most fascist minions in the Justice Department and various immigration police agencies, are making a Ronald Reagan play.

This is the Ronald Reagan of his California Governor terms. Fear your popularity is waning? Go find some young people, Berkeley students were preferred, and send in thuggish cops to beat and disperse them. Tear gas, batons, and helicopters make great theater; your weapons work as theater. White people in the burbs think you are protecting them. Who cares if a random young person gets blinded or even killed by your goon squad (back in the day it was Alameda county sheriffs)?

And -- crucially -- everyone forgets the substantive issues the students were raising and remembers the presence of protesters meant wild, fearsome violent scenes.

This may not work so well today. Most of the demonstrators nationally seem to have adopted a disciplined focus on demands for racial justice. The national racial reckoning is broad and deep and has established its issues in the national consciousness. Reagan's play, and the Trump/Barr play, is to goad the undisciplined among the demonstrators to play cat and mouse games in the streets and lose the thread.

The Moms have the right idea in the video. My friends in Portland have the right idea -- they go to speak out, not to play street guerilla.

This moment is about justice for Black lives. If we can remember what its all about, that remains our best defense against Trump's outrages. Trump is reaching into a dead past; we can move on toward a better future.