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This piece is a commentary, part of The Appeals collection of opinion and analysis.

Over the weekend, as massive protests against police violence unfolded in cities across America, President Trump watched from the White House and worked himself into a howling, bloodthirsty rage.

When the looting starts, the shooting starts, he declared in a tweet, three days after a white Minneapolis officer killed George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man arrested for allegedly passing a fake $20 bill, by kneeling on his neck for almost nine minutes. At one point, he applauded the National Guard for having stopped [looters] cold in Minnesota, as if he had just watched a football team make a particularly impressive goal-line stand; at another, he wistfully opined that the NYPD should be allowed to do their jobpresumably, in his mind, also stopping people cold. He retweeted a conservative radio hosts ominous prediction as an implicit threat: This isnt going to stop until the good guys are willing to use overwhelming force against the bad guys.

This president has long expressed a peculiar appreciation for authoritarian power and physical force. He is famously intolerant of anything over which he cannot exert control and incapable of viewing dissenterseven protesters challenging a shameful legacy of state-sanctioned racist violenceas anything other than enemies to crush underfoot. While the country tries to grapple with police brutality, perhaps more meaningfully than ever before, its chief executive is a man who openly and unapologetically endorses it.

Trump himself has little power over the day-to-day administration of law enforcement, which falls mostly to state and local authorities: governors, mayors, sheriffs. But the influence of the presidents bully pulpit is nonetheless significant, and on Monday morning, he took the nations governors to task, dismissing them as weak and urging them to dominate the protesters he watched on TV. You have to do retribution, he said, softening his apparent support for summary executions to stump for harsh mandatory minimums instead. You have to arrest people, and you have to try people, and they have to go to jail for long periods of time. Sentences of five to 10 years, he suggested, should be sufficient.

Then, in an unhinged Rose Garden address that evening, a fed-up Trump promised a crackdown, exhorting mayors and governors to dominate the streets with an overwhelming law enforcement presence in the days to come. As police on horseback fired rubber bullets and tear gas in nearby Lafayette Park, he proclaimed himself the president of law and order and threatened to deploy the militaryan institution that he does controlto quickly solve the problem for cities or states that dont do so to his satisfaction. It is hard to characterize this screed as anything other than a declaration of war on the people he ostensibly governs.

This sort of fervent cheerleading for raw power and military might is not new for Trump. In speeches, he has bemoaned the hostility against our police, and lashed out at laws that are horrendously stacked against them. He praised a Republican congressional candidate who body-slammed a reporter as my type of guy, and complained that the Geneva Conventions make U.S. soliders afraid to fight, and called for embracing torture methods that are a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding. While addressing a room full of law enforcement personnel in 2017, Trump encouraged themwhile laughing, but not jokingto be rough with people they throw into the backs of squad cars.

In his Rose Garden speech on Monday, Trump called himself an ally of all peaceful protesters, but history shows that he is no less enthusiastic about persecuting acts of civil disobedience. He referred to Black athletes kneeling during the national anthem as sons of bitches, turning quiet protests of police killings into a new front in his perpetual culture wars. On the campaign trail, he offered to pay the legal fees of rallygoers who attacked protesters, and occasionally fantasized about punching them himself, pining for the old days when they would have been carried out on a stretcher.

In a 1990 interview, he expressed awe at how ruthlessly the Chinese government crushed a series of student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square a year earlier. They were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength, he said. That shows you the power of strength. The exact number of victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre remains unknown, but has been estimated to be as high as 10,000.

The presidents gleeful fascination with official displays of brute force also surfaced last weekend, when he marveled at the tactical precision of Secret Service agents as they maintained the White Houses perimeter. Whenever someone got too frisky or out of line, they would quickly come down on them, harddidnt know what hit them, he mused.

If anyone had managed to breach the fence, Trump added for good measure, they would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen. Thats when people would have been really badly hurt, at least. To be clear, he was not insinuating that this would be an outcome hed regret.

Three-plus years into his administration, it is beyond clear that Donald Trump has no interest in doing the work of governing traditionally associated with the position he occupies. For him, being president is simply a chance to play an important person on television, eternally in search of the respect that eluded him in his careers as a reality TV personality, golf resort developer, and failed steak magnate.

What this means, in practice, is that when faced with a genuinely difficult problem, like a real-time reckoning with centuries of unchecked police violence against people of color, Trump has no earthly idea what to do next. I am not speculating here; while cities burned on Sunday, he and his team were said to have decided he should not address the nation because he had, as the Washington Post put it, nothing new to say, and no tangible policy or action to announce yet. This is about as damning as an indictment of a leaders competence can get.

So, when he finally decided the images on cable news were too much for a president of the United States to remain silent, Trump fell back on the one impulse with which he has always felt comfortable: unleashing the power of the state against those he sees as enemies, hoping to meet the uncertainty of the moment with the certainty of force. If protesters will not go home, arrest them. If they come back the next day, put them in prison. And if more take their place, governors willing to call in the National Guardand maybe a president eager to see troops marching through the streetscan solve the problem in short order.

Conveniently for him, his preferred brand of lazy authoritarianism dovetails nicely with this countrys tradition of militarized policing, which defines success primarily in terms of inflicting violence, and its obsession with punishment and incarceration, which provides a ready-made infrastructure for incapacitating dissidents. Law enforcement agencies have received billions of dollars worth of military gear over the last several decades, flooding communities with weapons designed for combat and turning city blocks into miniature battlefields. The U.S. incarcerates some 2.3 million people in more than 7,000 jails, prisons, and other facilities, and roughly half a million of them havent been convicted of anything. If this country isnt yet a police state, the tools that could be used to make it one have long been in place.

Among the many troubling implications of Donald Trumps logic is that it contains no obvious limiting principle: Pitting police and civilians against one another like this, over and over, will eventually lead to more officers killing more people. When it happens, it wont matter whether the victims were looters and rioters on one hand or gathered peacefully to remember the life of George Floyd on the other, because in Trumps eyes, crime and dissent are equally wicked and equally worthy of retribution. Violence has no place in American society, unless the perpetrator is wearing a badge and riot gear, in which case the system is working exactly as it should.

Jay Willis is a senior contributor at The Appeal.

See more here:
For Trump, There Is No Policing Without Violence - The Appeal

Wheeler needs to finish with more than 50% of the vote in order to win a second term outright in the primary.

PORTLAND, Ore. Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler has a big lead in early returns, but it remains unclear if he'll finish with the support needed to win a second term in Tuesday's primary. Wheeler needs to finish with more than 50% of the vote in order to win a second term outright.

If he doesn't, Wheeler, and the candidate that receives the second-most votes, who is Sarah Iannarone, will be in a runoff in the November general election.

Wheeler faced tremendous pressures in his first four years in office, from his handling of the Portland Police Bureau, to homelessness and culture wars.

He went up against a number of credible candidates, among them Iannarone, who finished third in the 2016 and had no intention of being swept aside in 2020.

She sued Wheeler following an Oregon Supreme Court ruling for receiving large campaign violations that violated a city law passed by voters in 2018. The suit came just after an Oregon Supreme Court decision upholding such laws.

During the campaign, Wheeler was called out for claiming endorsements that were not true, among them support from the Thorns and Timbers and City Commissioner Chloe Eudaly.

In a final indignity, the city auditor fined Wheeler $500 the day before the primary for having donor information on his campaign mailers so small it could not be read.

The Oregonian asked each of candidates to respond to a series of key policy questions. Read their answers here.

Read the original here:
Portland mayor election results: Wheeler with big lead, but November runoff possible - KGW.com

Late last week, as she was leading the charge to push the Democrats $3 trillion pandemic relief package through the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi strode the floor of the capitol in a fuchsia pantsuit, red pumps, white shell and a coordinated red, white and green cherry-print face mask.

This was the day after Ms. Pelosi had stood at a podium for a news conference in a black dress with a complementary dark green and white foliage-print face mask which was itself not long after she had appeared in a shell-pink pantsuit with a matching shell-pink mask.

Hillary Clinton took note, posting a photo on Instagram with the caption: Leader of the House majority, and of mask-to-pantsuit color coordination. The post has been liked more than 250,000 times.

Since late April, when she began wearing silk scarves that were color-coordinated with her suits and shells orange and orange, blue and blue and cream and brown and that she had worn bandanna-style around her face, Ms. Pelosi has also modeled a purple suit with a purple/blue, black and white geometric face mask and a white suit and blue shirt with the same.

And though it would be easy to categorize Ms. Pelosis masks as fun! and all about self-expression! and yes fashion!(as many style watchers have done), her track record and the way her approach contrasts with those around her suggests something more nuanced though the stratagem is covered, natch, by the accessibility of patterned cloth, the kind we all have to wear and to which we can all relate.

After all, why simply don a face mask when you can also use it to make a political point?

Indeed, the sheer variety of her masks stands out like a beacon amid her sea of aides in generic white or blue medical masks and her dark-masked protective detail. It suggests a commitment to consciously choosing a mask every single day that, more than simply demonstrating good mask habits, civic awareness and solicitude for those around her, or even support for small businesses, demands attention. (Many of her masks come from Donna Lewis, a small store in Alexandria, Va., where she also buys some of her suits; for each mask sold, one is donated to Johns Hopkins hospitals.)

As the president continues to eschew the mask in his public appearances over the weekend he went without one when meeting in the Rose Garden with Girl Scouts and small business leaders Ms. Pelosi is making her mask-wearing, and the contrast with those around her, impossible to ignore. Doing so is a constant reminder of the difference between the heads of the executive and legislative branches.

Official Washington may have come relatively late to this particularly emotive symbol of the contemporary culture wars, but it has now fully arrived.

Ms. Pelosi is not the first government official to match her masks to her outfit. That honor goes to the Slovakian president, Zuzana Caputova, whose image went viral in late March at the swearing in of her new coalition government when she wore a burgundy face mask that coordinated perfectly with her burgundy sheath dress. And, apparently, she instructed her new cabinet to wear identical masks (blue) and gloves (white) for the group photo, hence both distinguishing herself from the group and creating a perfectly harmonious picture of civic care.

Likewise, Emmanuel Macron donned a navy mask with a discreet red, white and blue grosgrain ribbon at the side to match his navy suit and little red, white and blue lapel pin on a visit to a school earlier this month.

Melania Trump, too, matched her basic white face mask to her basic white shirt when she appeared in her PSA for mask-wearing in early April. As did Ivanka Trump, who wore a black mask with a black jumpsuit to tour a Maryland produce distributor last week (though that mask had the effect of making her look unsettlingly like a movie bank robber, despite the little American flag pin on the side).

And though most of Congress has now been converted to mask-wearing, as the recent Senate hearings on Covid-19 revealed, with Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina modeling a University of North Carolina booster mask and Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, a red-and-black tie-dye bandanna. Still, they mostly seem to have resorted to the gimmick mask, the current equivalent of the gimmick tie (see also Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and his Washington Nationals mask), the patriot mask (Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina in a stars and stripes and eagles number) or the OK-Ill wear-it-if-I-have-to face mask that Vice President Mike Pence wore when he visited the General Motors and Ventec ventilator production plant in Indiana last month.

But no other elected official has embraced the mask with as much relentless and considered eye-catching range as Ms. Pelosi.

In this her resolve is fully in line with the Speakers approach to image-making, which has always involved every tool at her disposal, be it a clapback at the State of the Union or her Speakers mace pin. She understands that there are ways to make herself and her positions heard even when she isnt saying anything at all. That at a time when almost all communication is taking place within the confines of a small box, these kinds of details matter.

Continued here:
The Many Masks of Nancy Pelosi - The New York Times

Eminems second major-label album was a compelling but lurid whodunit. The Marshall Mathers LP wasnt a murder mystery, per se, though plenty of characters met their demise. It was a mystery of realness.

This remained a hip-hop conundrum 20 years ago especially after the still-unsolved deaths of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. Were rappers real or fake? If you claimed to be a product of the drug trade, had you actually moved weight? After Eminems unprecedented success for a white rapper, via The Slim Shady LP in 1999 and its follow-up, questions abounded. Was he a prankster, an industry plant, a generational voice? (The last was asserted in 2003 by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney). Were his lyrics truth or fantasy? Was he a public danger?

These days, a rappers rhymes are rarely more than a Twitter trending topic. But in 2000, multitudes were engrossed: a United States Senate committee about entertainment and violence (where vice-presidential wife Lynne Cheney said Eminem advocates murder and rape); feminist and gay activists; parents groups and religious activists.

In the often very catchy pop songs of The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem got into it with all these people, plus his family, other musicians (famous or obscure), celebrities and the media. As a result, virtually every bystander had an opinion cocked, locked and ready to rock, to quote another Motor City madman, Ted Nugent. Eminem was a one-man internet before the internet really became the internet.

With his troika of identities Marshall Mathers, Eminem, Slim Shady appearing together for the first time, multisyllabic mockery, metrical slaloms of disdain and lots of funny voices, he exorcised trauma like a street magician flourishing cards, lyrics whirring around your ears. In 2020, having gone platinum 10 times, The Marshall Mathers LP hits differently. But its still a vivid snapshot of the late culture wars, when a foul-mouthed white rapper was our worst public health scare.

All music previews and full tracks provided by Spotify. Warning: Many tracks contain strong language.

Read more from the original source:
Eminem's 'The Marshall Mathers LP': Hear What Came Before and After - The New York Times

One thing I will say about Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words is that its perfectly titled. There is almost nothing in this two-hour production that isnt in the words of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

His wife, Virginia Thomas, gets a bit of screen time, but shes totally in sync with her husbands version of history and the events in his life. If you want a two-hour production that feels more like hagiography than what I think of as a documentary with balancing voices, then Created Equal is for you. The question is whether such a one-sided, in his own words version of the life of a figure as controversial as Thomas is what public television should be offering in prime time. The answer to that question goes straight to the heart of our culture wars. Clarence Thomas and Michael Pack, the films director and producer, bring plenty of culture war baggage with them to the table.

Thomas, generally considered the most conservative member of the court, will forever be linked in the public mind to the charges of sexual harassment leveled against him by Anita Hill during his confirmation hearings to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991. During the hearings, Thomas denounced them as a circus a national disgrace a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.

As for Pack, he has become a culture wars hot potato since he was nominated to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees such operations as Voice of America. Some analysts see his nomination as part of an effort by President Donald Trump to create a global right-wing media messaging machine much as he has tried to do in the U.S. with Fox News, Breitbart News Network, the Sinclair Broadcast Group, One America News Network and other platforms.

As Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee worked to block his nomination, Trump himself intervened to get Pack, who has made two films with former Trump aide and Breitbart editor Steve Bannon, confirmed by the Senate.

If you hear whats coming out of the Voice of America, its disgusting, Trump said in April, voicing his anger about VOA coverage of Chinas role in the pandemic and the Senates failure to confirm Pack. The things they say are disgusting toward our country. And Michael Pack would get in and do a great job, but hes been waiting for two years. Cant get him approved.

A planned committee vote on Packs nomination was postponed Thursday. And later in the day, Sen. Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat and ranking member on the committee, said the office of the attorney general for the District of Columbia had informed the panel that it was investigating allegations that Pack funneled $1.6 million in funds from a nonprofit group he runs to his for-profit film company. The story was first reported in The Washington Post.

Pack declined to comment when I asked about his nomination. But thats what I mean about bringing culture war issues with him just like the subject of his film.

The format of Created Equal is Thomas sitting at a table talking to an off-camera interviewer, Pack. Thomas is thus literally narrating his life story for this PBS offering with occasional prompts and queries from Pack. Thomas previously wrote about his life story in his 2007 memoir, My Grandfathers Son.

Clarence Thomas story is a classic American Horatio Alger story, coming from dire poverty in the segregated South to the highest court in the land, Pack said.

It is a remarkable journey with him coming from further behind than almost any American political figure, especially when you take into account the segregation and racism he suffered, the filmmaker continued. His intellectual journey is also remarkable from being raised by his grandfather and Irish nuns with traditional hard work values, to rejecting those values and then finally coming back to them later in his life.

The narrative is a powerful one, and Pack uses it skillfully to engage and even move the viewer emotionally as he chronicles Thomas climb from Pin Point, Georgia, to Yale University and then the highest ranks of American conservative politics.

I was OK with the education-of-a-young-man narrative that drove the film from Thomas childhood to Catholic school and then the seminary and college life. Its when Thomas enters the realm of American politics as President Ronald Reagans chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1982 and then the Supreme Court nominee of President George H.W. Bush that the one-sided, in-his-own-words approach became seriously problematic to me.

I originally thought I would make more of a traditional documentary and interview a wide range of people on all sides of all these issues. But it would take a lot of people on all sides to deal with the many things that come up from affirmative action and busing to the Anita Hill charges themselves. And I thought I would lose Clarence Thomas voice, Pack said of his structural and editorial choices.

So, I thought it was better to have him tell his story, the filmmaker added. And its Clarence Thomas in his own words, so we dont hide that fact. Its not pretended to be the objective truth about his life. Its his subjective truth. And I think because weve made essentially that deal with the audience and we stick to that deal, the film has integrity.

Integrity is not a word I would use in connection with this film. I think some of its messages are not just one-sided; they are dangerous in the way they add to the deep political divide plaguing this nation.

In talking about his Senate confirmation hearings, Thomas says in the film, Most of my opponents on the Judiciary Committee cared about only one thing: how would I rule on abortion rights. You really didnt matter. And your life didnt matter. What mattered is what they wanted. And what they wanted was this particular issue.

As Thomas continues that thought, the camera starts a slow pan down the faces of the committee members: Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, the committee chair, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (Democrat, Massachusetts), who was seated next to Biden, and straight down the committee, of white, male Democrats.

I felt as though in my life I had been looking at the wrong people as to the people who would be problematic to me, Thomas says. We were told, Oh, its going to be the bigot in the pickup truck. Its going to be the Klansman. Its going to be the rural sheriff. And Im not saying there werent some of those who were bad. But it turned out through all of that, ultimately the biggest impediment was the modern day liberal, that they were the ones who discount all those things, because they have one issue or they have the power to caricature you.

The segment ends with the camera focused on Biden as he gavels the session to a close.

If you dont think there is a political, culture wars component to such moments in the film, consider this exchange between Fox News host Laura Ingraham and Pack in a video from her show that posted May 12 on the Fox News website.

After showing a clip from the film of Thomas warning those who issue accusations or back those who would accuse people like him that their time in the Tower of London will come, Ingraham says, Michael, how ironic that Biden is now on the other side of this one.

Indeed, hes got his own Anita Hill, Pack says referencing Tara Reade, who has accused Biden of sexually assaulting her in 1993 when she was a staff assistant in his Senate office.

I am not surprised that Ingraham says she loves Created Equal and will be supporting it in social media in coming days. Thats the way it works in the right-wing messaging machine.

What surprises me is that PBS is scheduled to air this film Monday, and in prime time no less. Thats surprising and tremendously disappointing as to the state of public television in the age of Donald Trump.

Created Equal is scheduled to air Monday at 9 p.m. EDT (check local listings).

(David Zurawik is The Baltimore Suns media critic. Email: david.zurawik@baltsun.com; Twitter: @davidzurawik.)

2020 The Baltimore Sun

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David Zurawik: If you want a one-sided, right-wing, celebratory version of the life of Clarence Thomas, PBS has just the ticket. Yes, PBS - The...