Over the past several weeks we have seen protest after protest featuring people, almost entirely white people, often armed, agitating for the right to put other people's lives at risk so that they can get a haircut. The cops have left them alone, the President has cheered for them and calls them very good people.
The past few nights, people, mostly people of color, have protested against a thing that is actually worth protesting against -- the very blatant murder, on camera, of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin -- and the cops not only show up, they show up in riot gear. The president does not cheer for these people. He calls them "thugs, not "very good people," not even "some very fine people" as he described the white nationalists protesting in Charlottesville. You know, the one where they ran a woman over with a car.
What does he do? He brings back classic segregationist threats like "When the looting starts, the shooting starts" and then tries to walk that shit back like it wasn't a threat, just a description of what often happens at these protests (because of the police shooting people).
And now, this morning, he's threatening people again. This time with "vicious dogs" and "ominous weapons."
I'm not even sure "threat" is the right word here. It reads like fan fiction. It reads like he's actually straight up just fantasizing about a scenario in which he gets to watch people get torn apart by vicious dogs and getting "really badly hurt." And 64,400 of his followers, so far, have liked that tweet. They too, I suppose, delight in the idea of watching people they disagree with torn apart by vicious dogs and ominous weapons.
Who does that? I have hated a lot of people in my life, but I have never fantasized about seeing them attacked by dogs. That's not a place my mind goes to. That would not be enjoyable for me, no matter how much I hated someone. That is not a thing I want to see with my own eyes.
But he does and so do they, and I don't know what we do about that or how we come back from it. That's scary. This woman, emojii smiling at the line "We put the young ones on the front line, sir, they love it, and good practice..." is one of the scariest things I've ever seen in my life.
I am not kidding, someone ought to check under the floorboards of the houses of these people responding so positively to this tweet, because nothing will convince me that at least half of them are not serial killers. Gotta love that so many of them are all caps yelling FOLLOW THE LAW as if Trump supporters had not just spent the last month ... not following the law.
At some point today, or tomorrow, Trump's advisors will come up with a "Well what he really meant was," just as they do all of the time, and he will parrot it and be absolutely outraged by the fact that anyone would suggest that he would take sadistic joy in seeing people torn apart by dogs. There will be a rant and we will all feel tired and maybe this is the kind of thing we'll forget about because God, there are just so many things and it never ends.
But we shouldn't forget and we should be scared. We should be scared because the President of the United States is threatening to hurt people "very badly," but we should also be scared that this is the well his mind goes to when he is mad at people and that he thinks this is a good look for him.
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