Trump touts dominating protests with “compassion” as he excuses police violence at protests

“Load up, load up, load up with rubber bullets
I love to hear those convicts squeal
It’s a shame these slugs ain’t real
But we can’t have dancin’ at the local county jail”

– Kevin Godley, Lol Creme, Graham Gouldman – 10CC

10CC were so prescient when they wrote this song back in 1973, reportedly inspired by the Attica prison riots, but who knew they could have had a future as speechwriters for Donald Trump in 2020 when the president held a roundtable on police reform and inequity in the American justice system this afternoon at Gateway Church in Dallas, Texas.

The conference was largely seen as a sidebar to his fundraising trip to Dallas in order to convince wealthy Texans to throw away their money on his doomed 2020 reelection campaign in exchange for all those wonderful tax cuts that he signed off on. As an experienced real estate developer, Trump knows the culture of kickbacks quite intimately as he seemingly seeks many “quos” for the “quids” he has provided the billionaire class.

The roundtable was notable for the absence of Dallas mayor Eric Johnson (D) and three of the region’s leading law enforcement officials — all of whom are African American and were either not invited by the Trump administration or chose not to attend.

Given the president’s prolific volume of tweets on the topic of “LAW & ORDER!” in the wake of nationwide protests against the unequal application of justice in this country based on the melanin content on one’s skin, Trump’s remarks about public order and the funding of police were predictable

CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale followed the proceedings and summarized Trump’s talking points on Twitter.

Add your name to tell states and police to reject Trump’s calls to use violence against peaceful protestors!

Stoking divisions and pushing extreme agendas are things that Trump has particular expertise in — if he can be said to have anything resembling expertise at all — so this bit of finger-pointing should be filed along with the thousands of other examples of projection wherein the president has attributed his own most glaring faults and foibles to his opponents.

Just as a majority of Americans are realizing that police departments around the country suffer from systemic racism as manifested in the persistent death toll of unarmed black citizens at the hands of these bad apples, the president seemingly forgets the saying from which the phrase “bad apple” derives: “One bad apple spoils the whole bunch.”

While this phenomenon is caused by ethylene gas in the fruit, in police forces, bad apples set a tone and culture that the good apples can’t seem to overcome, as peer pressure to protect their peers stymie any efforts by good cops to eliminate the ones rotten to the core.

Additionally, the intervention of police unions usually prevents the bad apples from ever being held accountable for their misdeeds.

Trump took the opportunity of the roundtable to announce his own (or likely his advisors’) four-step plan to address the issues that both provoked the protests of the past two weeks and those that resulted from the police riots witnessed in response to those protests.

Trump waxing poetic about the “beautiful” gassing of protestors and having police bash people’s heads in and shoot them point blank with supposedly non-lethal projectiles is about as disgusting as it can get.

Still, the president modified his much-criticized call for government officials to “dominate” the streets filled with angry and fed-up demonstrators by appending the phrase “with compassion” to his calls for domination as if he could purloin the “compassionate conservative” mantle from George W. Bush instead of having to deal with the repercussions of the death of George Floyd.

You can watch an excerpt from Donald Trump’s remarks on compassionate force at his Dallas police reform roundtable in the clip attached to the tweet below.

But before we leave you, let’s take one more look at how truly Nostradamus-like 10CC were when they wrote “Rubber Bullets” s many years ago:

“Sergeant Baker started talkin’ with a bullhorn in his hand (bullhorn in his hand, bullhorn in his hand)
He was cool, he was clear, he was always in command (always in command, always in command)
He said ‘Blood will flow, here Padre
Padre you talk to your boys’
‘Trust in me
God will come to set you free’
Well we don’t understand why you called in the National Guard (National Guard, the National Guard)
When Uncle Sam is the one who belongs in the exercise yard (exercise yard, the exercise yard)
We all got balls and brains
But some’s got balls and chains
At the local dance at the local county jail”

Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter.

Original reporting by Daniel Dale at CNN.

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Vinnie Longobardo

is the Managing Editor of Washington Press and a 35-year veteran of the TV, mobile, & internet industries, specializing in start-ups and the international media business. His passions are politics, music, and art.