“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.
At his roundtable in Dallas, Trump begins by calling for "law and order" and criticizing Seattle.
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) June 11, 2020
Trump: In recent days, there has been a vigorous discussion about how to ensure fairness, equality, and justice for all, but "unfortunately there are some trying to stoke division and to push an extreme agenda…" (He cites the police-defunding movement.)
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) June 11, 2020
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.
Trump: We have to respect police; "if they're allowed to do their job, they'll do a great job."
"And you always have a bad apple no matter where you go. You have bad apples. And there are not too many of them, and I can tell you, there are not too many in the police department."
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) June 11, 2020
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 says he's announcing four steps, one of which is that he's "working to finalize an executive order that will encourage police departments nationwide to meet the most current professional standards for the use of force, including tactics for de-escalation."
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) June 11, 2020
Trump fondly recalls how the National Guard helped stop violent protest in Minneapolis, then says Seattle's current "autonomous zone" protest situation would be "so easy to solve" if it had a governor like Texas has.
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) June 11, 2020
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.
Trump: We'll encourage police departments to meet standards on the use of force. "That means force, but force with compassion." He adds, "If somebody is really bad, you're gonna have to do it with real strength, real power."
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) June 11, 2020
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.
“We’re dominating the street with compassion” pic.twitter.com/yiFeVsimpU
— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) June 11, 2020
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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