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Trump Claims “Chaos Is Coming.” Hello, It’s Already Here.
White suburban mothers should fear their own fathers, sons, and husbands
It’s exhausting to have to repeatedly list all the ways in which the criminal justice system and some members of the media mistreat Black people. This sentiment was palpable in the message Jacob Blake’s sister Letetra Widman provided when speaking to the press last week. “I’m not sad, I’m not sorry; I’m angry, and I’m tired,” she said, adding, “I don’t want your pity. I want change.” She also spoke about the indefatigable grief that Black people have been experiencing for generations.
One would hope that after such an impassioned statement following yet another viral, traumatic Black moment involving police, that the president would say something, anything, even if it rang hollow to the Blake family. Well, you would be wrong. Instead, Donald Trump stood at a press conference and lied a tremendous lie. He told reporters that he had spoken with the Blake family pastor and that he wouldn’t be meeting with them when he visited Kenosha, Wisconsin, because they wanted to have lawyers involved.
All of that is patently false. Jacob Blake Sr. told reporters, “We don’t have a family pastor. I don’t know who he talked to. I don’t care who he talked to.”
This lie seemed extra special because it was easily fact-checked. It conjured a pastor and a conversation that simply did not exist. But what were we expecting from Trump? The truth? Empathy? A better lie? This from a man who, days before coming to Kenosha for a photo-op, sat down for an interview with Laura Ingraham and compared the shooting of Jacob Blake to a golf stroke. “They can do 10,000 great acts, which is what they do, and one bad apple — or a choker, you know, a choker, they choke — shooting the guy in the back many times,” Trump told the Fox News host.
Trump’s Kenosha visit was his administration’s version of tragedy porn. Trump wanted the imagery of him walking past charred buildings and disarray as a visual to help him continue his Republican National Committee scare campaign to show the White suburban moms of America that the “domestic terrorism” — as he has referred to protesters — would be coming to a city near them if Joe Biden was elected as…
