The President can’t rage his way out of a problem created by American rage

When you choose to nominate or elect Donald Trump, you’re rolling the dice. He can surprise you in the good ways — defeating a heavily-favored Hillary Clinton, connecting with despairing working-class whites in the upper Midwest who had preferred Democrats in recent cycles, giving Wall Street a burst of confidence and optimism, and shocking the Iranian regime by killing Qasem Soleimani. But he will also inevitably surprise you in the bad ways — even if you thought you already knew how bad he could get.

He will obsess over what’s being said about him on television and lash out in tirades on Twitter. He will repeat and spread insane conspiracy theories. He will demand absolute loyalty from everyone in his party and demonstrate none to anyone else; he will regard all decisions of governing through the lens of what that person or group can do for him personally. He will contradict himself frequently, insisting he’s a law-and-order president and then demonise the FBI and Department of Justice as part of a vast sinister cabal working against him. Perhaps most consequentially, Trump will demonstrate no empathy and refuse to even try.

For three years, the chaotic circus of Trump endured tense moments with North Korea and national disgraces like Charlottesville, but it largely avoided true crises and calamities — certainly nothing on the scale of the coronavirus pandemic. Now, atop what is arguably the greatest and most far-reaching threat the country has faced since the 1918 flu pandemic, American neighbourhoods are burning with angry protests, riots, and widespread distrust of the police.

Calming the off-the-charts anger and tension in America would be a tall order for any president. But Trump isn’t really interested in trying. It’s not in his nature.

The police role in the death of George Floyd should outrage every American. Floyd was a 46-year-old father of two daughters. Minnesota’s pandemic response restrictions recently prompted Floyd to be laid-off from his job as a restaurant security guard. Minneapolis Police Department officers responded to a report of a “forgery in progress”; Floyd had allegedly attempted to use a forged $20 bill at a deli. Shortly after police put handcuffs on Floyd and put him on the ground, bystanders with cell phones started recording the arrest.  When the videos begin, Floyd is already pinned to the ground, and MPD Officer Derek Chauvin is kneeling on his neck. Floyd repeatedly gaspingly told the police he couldn’t breathe. Chauvin held his knee on Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, including almost three minutes after Floyd became unresponsive.

This was not a split-second decision of a policeman in a violent situation, or a case of mistaken identity, or a circumstance where the officer was forced into a kill-or-be-killed situation. A man arrested in a nonviolent crime was put in a life-threatening situation — explicitly wheezing to the officers he couldn’t breathe, much like the case of Eric Garner in New York City. Police ignored his cries until the life was pressed out of him.

This is the most consequential video of police brutality in the United States since four officers beat Rodney King with nightsticks in Los Angeles in 1991. But for the people in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, this was only the latest in a disturbing pattern of police killing someone who, whether they had committed a crime or not, did not deserve to die.

The area’s Black Lives Matter movement stirred over the fatal police shooting of Jamar Clark in 2015. Philando Castile was killed during a live-streamed traffic stop in a suburb of St. Paul in 2016; Officer Jeronimo Yanez, who shot him five times from point blank range, was acquitted of all charges. In 2017, Justine Ruszczyk, an unarmed woman who called 911 for help, was killed by Minneapolis cop Mohamed Noor.

In a sequence that would be funny if it wasn’t so disturbing, after rioting hit the Minneapolis streets, Minnesota State Police arrested CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez and members of his camera crew and refused to say why… as the whole country watched on live television. Some police officer walked down the street with the seized camera, unaware that the images from it were still going out live to CNN’s audience. Jiminez and his crew were released an hour later, with no explanation of why they were arrested.

You don’t have to be a radical civil libertarian to see a disturbing pattern of police abusing their power and authority.

A normal president would ask whether the culture within police forces has conditioned officers to see themselves as being at war with the public they are supposed to be protecting and serving — part of a broader trend of militarising police forces. A normal president would understand the need to get police and heartbroken, frustrated, angry citizens to stop seeing the worst in each other. A normal president would understand the need for accountability — Derek Chauvin has been fired and charged with third-degree murder — and the need for African-Americans to be reassured that the rest of American society does not quietly assent to these actions and that in fact black lives do matter. A normal president might also remember that we still have an ongoing coronavirus pandemic, and people gathering in large crowds without social distancing and shouting could have serious consequences in the coming weeks.

But Trump’s philosophy on these matters is best summarised as “law and order for other people.” When he discusses the police, he generally jokes that they aren’t rough enough with those who are arrested. During a speech in front of police in Long Island, Trump said, “when you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough, I said, please don’t be too nice. Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over, like, don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody. Don’t hit their head. I said, you can take the hand away, okay?”

Throughout the Mueller investigation and impeachment, Trump insisted he was the innocent victim of a Kafkaesque nightmare of runaway, unaccountable, partisan law enforcement. The president is a passionate advocate for the rights of the accused, when he is the one accused.

Going back to The Art of the Deal, Trump has articulated that he sees life as a never-ending competition. “Money was never a big motivation for me, except for keeping score,” he wrote (or more accurately, his ghostwriter transcribed). “The real excitement is playing the game.” Trump constantly talks about competition, conflict, who’s a winner and who’s a loser, who’s strong and who’s weak, who’s the best, who’s the most powerful.

While Trump did express condolences and sympathies to the family of George Floyd, it did not take long for the president to start seeing the issue through the lens of competition — rioters and looters against the police, and himself against the Democratic officials in Minnesota.

Shortly after midnight on May 29, Trump announced on Twitter, “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!” Many African-Americans find the word “thug” to be a knee-jerk demonisation of young black men, but even more consequentially, Trump reached back to the 1960s for the slogan, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” In President Trump’s mind, the best way to calm down a tense, racially-charged crisis driven by widespread distrust of authority is to promise that those in authority will soon be using deadly force more frequently.

By Saturday morning, the ongoing clash in several American cities had brought the president back to rhetorical territory that must have felt as reassuring as a warm bath: the problem was that the mayor of Minneapolis was weak and not strong like him: “Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis will never be mistaken for the late, great General Douglas McArthur or great fighter General George Patton. How come all of these places that defend so poorly are run by Liberal Democrats? Get tough and fight (and arrest the bad ones). STRENGTH!”

Trump climbed to the apex of American politics with his mindset of relentless conflict — “Little Marco,” “Low-Energy Jeb,” “Lyin’ Ted,” “Crooked Hillary,” “Fake news” “Shady Comey” “Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd.” The president approaches problems like the Incredible Hulk; he gets angry and rhetorically smashes things.

But eventually life throws problems at a president that cannot be solved by getting angry and calling people names and raging and fuming. A virus does not care if it is called names. A coalition of legislators to pass a bill cannot be easily assembled by a rageaholic. And the problem of police brutality — whether it is evil but rare, as defenders of America’s police forces want to believe, or whether it is disturbingly common, as some African-Americans contend — cannot be solved or even mitigated by someone who sees life as an endless series of gladiatorial fights between groups he likes and groups he does not.

Bill Clinton’s syrupy “I feel your pain” response to Americans who experienced tragedy could feel cloying and cheap. But perhaps when someone has lost so much, they appreciate any expression of empathy.

Past US presidents have been stiff, or awkward, or a little off-key in their efforts to express sympathy for Americans enduring calamities and tragedies and hardship. But they all tried, and usually the country gave them some credit for trying. Donald Trump can’t even fake it, five months from Election Day.