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(CNN) – During the summer, as demonstrations for racial justice swept through American cities, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, warned that he would exercise the powers of the government to suppress the violence. Adopting a mantle of “law and order”, Trump himself announced from the East Room a wave of federal agents and criticized groups like Black Lives Matter for cultivating “hatred.”
“My first duty as president is to protect the American people, and today I am taking steps to fulfill that sacred obligation,” he declared.
A few months later, Trump’s only acknowledgment that his administration shot down an alleged domestic terror plot to kidnap the Democratic governor of Michigan was to wonder why he hadn’t been thanked.
The way that Trump chooses to promote his administration’s efforts to enforce “law and order” follows a clear pattern of political calculation; In cases where the Justice Department finds cases that bolster its claims of fraudulent voting, rampant urban crime, or deep state corruption, Trump is eager to get involved. He is likely to reinforce the message about quelling the violence Saturday when he delivers remarks on “law and order” from a White House balcony to a crowd on the South Lawn.
But when the administration has worked to combat extremist anti-government groups, which even its own FBI says pose the most pressing threat to the nation, Trump has, at best, ignored the efforts, and at worst cases, he has used them to stoke resentments in groups. followers.
The situation could only get more tense as the elections approach and some extremist groups seek to retaliate against continued shutdown orders. Trump himself has criticized the continued restrictions and has deliberately refused to call for post-election calm, even when he makes false claims about a rigged vote.
Former officials and others familiar with the situation say Trump has shown little interest in making efforts to combat domestic terrorism a priority for his administration, despite warnings from law enforcement officials, members of Congress. and groups that track extremism on the growing threat from extremists and far away. -Right groups. Some have claimed that White House officials attempted to suppress the use of the phrase “domestic terrorism” entirely during the course of the Trump administration.
Others said it was clear that Trump acknowledged that his own supporters were among those labeled “domestic terrorists” and believed he would damage his position with his base warning of their danger.
Encouraged instead by immigration enforcement and a crackdown on urban crime, issues he believes galvanize his voters, Trump has publicly downplayed the threat posed by armed militia groups and tried to focus attention on other places.
After the FBI investigated whether local officials in Pennsylvania incorrectly discarded the ballots, Attorney General Bill Barr personally briefed Trump on the matter and revealed details during an interview with Fox before they were made public.
He has also shown an enthusiastic and sometimes furious interest in the department’s work to investigate the origins of the Russia investigation, publicly encouraging Barr to “move” this week to press criminal charges as the presidential election approaches.
But he has not made broad or expressive calls on the fight against national terrorism. In the hours of television telephone interviews he conducted after the Michigan plot was revealed, Trump hardly mentioned it in passing, and only to lament the fact that he was not receiving credit.
“The president always wants to pick a side, and he wants to pick the side that supports him,” said Miles Taylor, a former Homeland Security official in the Trump administration who now opposes the president and is a CNN contributor. “But Donald Trump has created, in my opinion, the favorable conditions that have allowed these national terrorist groups to rise up.”
“The White House wanted to cover their eyes and they wanted to cover their ears when they learned of domestic terrorism because they didn’t want to pay attention to right-wing extremists that they saw as a potential base of support,” Taylor said. “As a consequence, the president’s rhetoric has served as a loaded weapon for those groups that have since taken his words as a kind of permission to do what they are doing.”
The plot
On Thursday, instead of specifically condemning the groups that allegedly hatched an elaborate plot to kidnap Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and instigate a civil war, Trump went after the governor for failing to ease coronavirus restrictions in his state.
“Gov. Whitmer of Michigan has done a terrible job. She closed her state to everyone except her husband’s boating activities,” Trump tweeted. “The federal government has provided tremendous help to the great people of Michigan. My Justice Department and federal law enforcement announced today that they thwarted a dangerous plot against the Governor of Michigan. Instead of thanking, she calls me a white supremacist while Biden and the Democrats refuse to condemn Antifa, the anarchists, the looters and the mobs that burn down the Democrat-controlled cities. “
Before his tweet, Whitmer had accused Trump of fostering conditions that allowed groups like the Wolverine Watchmen, whose members were indicted Thursday, to prosper.
“Just last week, the president of the United States stood before the American people and refused to condemn white supremacists and hate groups like these two Michigan militia groups,” Whitmer said, stating that those who were conspiring to kidnap her “they had listened to the words of the president.” not as a reprimand, but as a battle cry, as a call to action. “
Meanwhile, Trump insisted he did not endorse anything the group did, including when he accused Whitmer of angering the citizens of his state by maintaining coronavirus lockdowns.
“I do not tolerate ANY extreme violence,” he wrote. “Defending ALL Americans, even those who oppose and attack me, is what I will always do as your President! Governor Whitmer, open your state, open your schools, and open your churches!”
He wrote the message while recovering from the coronavirus at the White House. He echoed Trump’s calls over the summer for Whitmer to reverse restrictions on businesses and meetings aimed at preventing the spread of the coronavirus.
Right-wing groups have protested Whitmer’s pandemic response since the beginning of the crisis, when thousands of people, some of them armed, gathered in the state capital in Lansing to demand that he revoke the executive orders that shut down much of the state. .
Trump sided with those protesters, many of whom arrived at the Capitol waving Trump flags. He tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” and said that those who fought for looser rules were “very nice people, but they are angry.”
Protesters
Two months later, Trump took the opposite view of protesters demanding justice after the police murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who died in police custody in Minnesota. Trump ordered a huge federal response to the protests, which spread to cities across the country.
The president was responding to criticism from his allies that he appeared weak as some of the protests turned violent. But the crackdown generated a fierce backlash, particularly after chemical agents were used to clear a park in front of the White House so that Trump could hold a photo shoot outside a church.
As protests have continued in some cities, Trump has sided with groups that have tried to quell the violence themselves. He defended a caravan of his supporters that headed to Portland, Oregon, and fired paintball guns at protesters, calling them “peaceful protesters” and claiming they were using paintballs as a “defensive mechanism.”
He has also defended Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old who is accused of fatally shooting two people during protests over the police shooting of another unarmed black man, Jacob Blake.
The social media accounts believed to belong to Rittenhouse portray a young white man with an affinity for guns who supports “Blue Lives Matter” and Trump. When asked if he agreed with armed vigilantes like Rittenhouse taking to the streets, Trump said he “would like law enforcement to take care of everything,” but did not condemn vigilantism.
The issue appeared to reach a zenith during the first presidential debate, when Trump refused to specifically condemn the Proud Boys, a far-right group whose ideology has been labeled “misogynist, Islamophobic, transphobic and anti-immigration” by Anti-Defamation. League.
Instead, Trump told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stay out,” a phrase that was later adopted by the group in memes and social media posts.
In statements online, Proud Boys have claimed that they have only used violence in self-defense. But members are often seen carrying firearms, bats and wearing protective gear, and some have been convicted of crimes against anti-fascist protesters. His supporters have been seen in recent protests across the United States, including in Portland.
Later, Trump insisted that he had never heard of the Proud Boys. After days of backlash, he finally said he condemned them in an interview on Fox. But that didn’t seem to dampen the group’s support for him; its founder joined a vigil for the president outside the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center over the weekend.
This story was first published on CNN.com “Trump’s Law and Order Mantra Disappears in the wake of Domestic Terror Plot Against Democratic Governor”
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