By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, September 01, 2020
Until a few days ago, Democrats were content to pretend
the disorder in American cities didn’t exist.
Now, worried that Joe Biden is on his back foot on the
issue, they readily acknowledge the rioting — and blame it on President Donald
Trump.
One would think that, given the fusillade they unleashed
against Trump at the convention, if Democrats truly believed that the president
is responsible for Black Lives Matter activists and anarchists attacking cops
and burning down buildings, they would have mentioned it at least once.
But no, they didn’t bring it up, in keeping with how
progressives have minimized the violence all along as inconvenient to a
narrative of courageous young people rising up against systemic racism.
There’s no doubt that Trump constantly stirs the pot and
often acts more the Twitter provocateur than the president. This is an
abdication of an important part of his leadership role, but it’s not him or his
allies torching businesses and vandalizing public property.
The violence has overwhelmingly racked cities governed by
Democratic mayors and city councils for decades. They run the police
departments, the schools, and the housing authorities. If the cops are violent
and corrupt, it’s on them. If they are such miserable places to live that they
are powder kegs, it’s on them. If they can’t maintain basic order, it’s on
them.
If Joe Biden thinks these localities are doing a poor
job, he can say so, but, of course, since blue mayors are his allies, he won’t
say a discouraging word.
Portland continues to be a flashpoint. The city and state
authorities have had more than 100 days to get the city under control, which
shouldn’t be mission impossible. We are talking a midsize city in the Pacific
Northwest of the United States of America, not Juarez, Caracas, or San
Salvador.
Even after years of coddling left-wing extremists,
Portland could control its streets if it had the will. It doesn’t.
Mayor Ted Wheeler wants to cater to the mob as much as
possible, even if the mob doesn’t like him very much. He apologized earlier
this summer for the Portland police allegedly using excessive tear gas, and
issued guidance saying cops could use it only if they feared injury or death.
Wheeler showed up at the federal courthouse when it was
being besieged by unruly crowds to demonstrate his sympathy and, for his
trouble, got shouted at and jostled (a security team protected him).
Even as Wheeler traded barbs with Trump over the weekend,
protesters staged a sit-in in the lobby of his condo building, demanding that
he cut the police budget by half and then eliminate the police entirely. They
also called on him, as an embodiment of “white supremacy,” to resign.
Wheeler’s fecklessness is matched by that of the local
prosecutor. The Multnomah County district attorney, Mike Schmidt has been
dropping most of the charges against rioters. As the Oregonian reported,
“his prosecutors won’t pursue demonstrators accused of interfering with police,
disorderly conduct, criminal trespass, escape or harassment,” unless they’ve
deliberately targeted property or people.
None of this is Trump’s fault, and it runs counter to his
inclinations.
It wasn’t anything Trump said or did that set off the
initial nationwide unrest a few months ago. It was a spontaneous reaction to
the death of George Floyd, which Trump repeatedly condemned. The dynamic has
been the same, only on a larger scale, as Ferguson, Mo., while Barack Obama was
president — anger at police action, followed by rioting treated with kid gloves
by the media.
Everyone knows there are different rules for Black Lives
Matter. If a conservative movement with the cachet and corporate support of BLM
staged an event featuring a single act of arson, the group would be shunned and
its cause discredited. That this would never happen to BLM acts as a giant
permission slip, and it’s not Trump writing it, but all the people now blaming
him for the rioting.
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