This feels like change

America is at war again — with itself. How does a nation proclaiming it was “conceived in liberty” and whose Declaration of Independence trumpets that “all men are created equal,” deal with the self-evident truth that this country was built on the labor of enslaved people whose descendants still, 155 years after emancipation, are not treated equally?

Our streets are filled with marchers grieving for the murder of George Floyd, only the latest in a long litany of black victims of law enforcement, including 12 year-old Tamir Rice, shot while playing in a park, Breonna Taylor, shot while sleeping in her own bed, and Philando Castile, shot during a traffic stop. Donald Trump’s response to protests against police violence has been to label the protestors “thugs” and “domestic terrorists.” He demanded state governors “dominate the streets.” If they won’t crack down, Trump said, he’d send in the US military against American citizens, adding: “I wish we had an occupying force in there.” As of June 1, 17,000 National Guard had been deployed to quell domestic unrest on American soil — about the same number of active-duty troops now stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When Trump was elected in 2016, I dared hope our institutions, flawed though they are, would help us survive a petulant ignoramus who sees the world as a reality TV show and himself as its star. I assumed he’d surround himself with competent people. Naive, I know. Aided by a supine Republican party terrified to cross him lest he rage-tweet against them, and a reactionary Supreme Court beholden to him, Trump has pretty much done what he likes.

Impeachment hasn’t dented his narcissist’s armor. He’s turned his fatally belated (and frequently irrational) response to the Covid-19 pandemic, including musing about injecting disinfectant and claiming to be taking the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, into political pay dirt, insisting that his name appear on the stimulus cheques sent out to taxpayers and using the excuse of “restarting the economy” to issue executive orders gutting whatever environmental regulations he hadn’t already repealed.

Now, holed up in the White House, newly surrounded by a mile and a half of metal fencing and concrete barriers, he’s concerned only with his re-election, weirdly channeling Richard Nixon, declaring himself “your president of law and order,” signalling to his almost entirely white base, themselves terrified of black folks invading their suburbs, that he’ll “Keep America Great” — which is to say, white-ruled. Nixon vowed to come down hard on those hippies, commies, and peaceniks going around burning the flag. On 4 May, 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students protesting against the Vietnam War. Four died. Trump said he wanted the National Guard and our militarised police to “fight like hell.”

It was terrifying then; it’s terrifying now. Yet this feels a little different. This feels like change. Not national transformation — that will take decades of education, re-directed budget priorities, and the coming to political power of those young people who are now in the streets. Still, we’re beginning to talk about the history of American police as a force founded to interdict black bodies. They began 250 years ago as slave patrols. The nonchalance of the Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin as he ground George Floyd’s head into the ground, knee on his neck, hand in his pocket, displayed the grotesque truth that, for the police — as for much of white America — black lives didn’t matter, not really. But Americans who might not have been paying attention before are enraged, taking to the streets, pandemic or no pandemic. The marchers are black, white, Latino, Native American, Asian — the whole rainbow. Will they vote in November? That’s the question.

What’s certain is that Trump is slipping in the polls and is in trouble, even in his own party. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and the much-admired retired generals Mattis, Kelly and Powell, have disparaged Trump’s divisiveness, incompetence, and cruelty. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney marched with protestors in Washington. Some of Trump’s evangelical base were appalled when police used rubber bullets and tear gas to drive peaceful protestors out of Lafayette Square for a photo-op with Trump in front of St. John’s Church, brandishing an (upside down) bible that his daughter Ivanka had fished out of her handbag. Of course, Trump maintains his hold on 38 per cent of American voters and most Republicans will keep playing to that shrinking but still-powerful audience. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky recently derailed, of all things, a federal anti-lynching bill. Florida Sen. Rick Scott, completely missing the point of demonstrating against police brutality, said, “People have the right to protest. But you cannot do it against the police.”

But America is slowly beginning to get it. In the hours before dawn on Friday June 5,  a band of Washington municipal workers, artists, and volunteers assembled on 16^th Street, the grand avenue that dead-ends at the White House, to send a message. In bright chrome yellow capital letters 30 feet high and stretching for two blocks, they painted BLACK LIVES MATTER. If President Donald Trump happens to look out his East Wing window, he can’t miss it.