Let’s start today’s newsletter with a quick news quiz.
Who said this in regards to clearing up the protests on the Columbia University campus last week?
“The police came. It was all over in exactly two hours. It was beautiful to see.”
And who said that regarding the attempted insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021?
“It was a beautiful day.”
In both cases, of course, the answer lies with former President Donald Trump, who used self-serving and often inaccurate stories about both events in his presidential campaign. He has denounced the campus protests as lawless chaos even as he portrays the Jan. 6 rioters as heroes — and appears to be trying to play one episode off against another as he tries to clean up his own record as president.
As he continued to campaign in recent weeks during his New York criminal trial, Trump sought to use college protests against the war in Gaza to his political advantage. He praised the arrests of protesters and suggested in an interview with Time magazine that he would call in the National Guard to quell protests if they occurred under his watch.
“Columbia just canceled their start,” Trump said Monday at the Manhattan courthouse where he is being tried. “That should not happen.”
Trump, who frequently uses violent rhetoric – including suggesting that there would be “chaos” and “potential death and destruction” if various criminal cases against him moved forward – is trying to portray President Biden as a hapless leader who will not quell the protests can get control.
But Trump’s calls for order stand in stark contrast to the way he talks about Jan. 6, a day that saw brutal violence against police officers but which he has nonetheless made the talking point of his third presidential campaign.
He sided with the rioters arrested that day, lamented the time some had spent in prison, called them “hostages” and “incredible patriots” and said he would consider pardoning them if he came to power returned.
Now he compares the punishments meted out to the Jan. 6 rioters to those faced by college protesters, even though the two events are fundamentally different.
“They took over a building. This is a big deal,” Trump said last week, referring to protesters in Columbia. He wondered if their punishment would be “anyway comparable” to that of the mob that broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6.
“It was an attack on democracy”
As the Biden campaign seeks to make Jan. 6 a central point in its case against Trump, the emergence of protests on college campuses across the country — and the images they have generated of clashes between protesters and counter-protesters and mass arrests — some Democrats are nervous.
“How can Democrats and all of us on this side say that January 6th was wrong?” Rev. Al Sharpton said on MSNBC, making comments that were quickly picked up by Fox News. “If you can show the same images on college campuses, you lose morale, you lose the moral high ground.”
But many other Democrats have been quick to say that the campus protests have little in common with Jan. 6.
“What happened on January 6th is a violent mob. They came and attacked the Capitol Police, they came and attacked the Capitol, it was an attack on democracy,” said Harry Dunn, a former Capitol Police officer who was at the Capitol that day. He later testified that he saw his comrades fighting rioters covered in blood and that racial insults were hurled at him.
Dunn, who is now running for the Democratic nomination for a congressional seat in Maryland, said in an interview that members of his party need to be aware of what happened that day – particularly in response to Trump’s attempts to distort the facts .
“People are really upset about what happened and they have real fears about whether it could happen again,” he said.
Some Democrats are concerned about Trump’s rhetoric, warning that it creates a dangerous permission structure for his supporters.
“Donald Trump is sending a message that his followers can break the law and commit violence whenever they follow his lead,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a Democrat who led the unsuccessful impeachment of Trump over the events of March 17 . January 2011. 6 and was part of a months-long investigation into the day’s events by a special committee in the House of Representatives.
“Everything in America is in chaos”
Some Republicans are finding it difficult to defend the inconsistency of calling for the prosecution of protesters on college campuses while simultaneously defending those accused of breaking the law on Jan. 6.
That includes Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, a Trump ally and vice presidential candidate, who was asked last week by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins whether people who break into and vandalize a building should be prosecuted.
“Exactly,” Vance said before Collins asked why he raised money for some of the Jan. 6 defendants.
Vance accused the national media of being “obsessed” with Jan. 6 and said some of the people who protested on Jan. 6 “face the full burden of the Justice Department if they are charged with, at worst, misdemeanors.” . .”
Over the weekend, some of Trump’s Republican allies in Congress tried to portray the college protests as a factor that would help him in the November election.
“One of the many reasons Donald Trump is going to win this election is because there are Democratic protesters out there decorating a statue of George Washington with a terrorist headdress,” Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas said Sunday on ABC, apparently referring to him on how a protester draped a kaffiyeh over a statue of the first president at George Washington University.
“Everything in America is in chaos, from our border to our campuses,” said Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who is also a potential Trump vice presidential running mate.
It is not clear whether the strategy will work. In 2020, Trump tried to blame racial justice protests, which sometimes turned violent and resulted in property destruction, on Biden and Democratic mayors — but he still lost.
Not only did he try to use the campus protests to speak out about the treatment of the defendants on June 6. A woman was killed when a car drove into a crowd of counter-protesters.
“Charlottesville is a peanut compared to the riots and anti-Israel protests taking place across our country RIGHT NOW,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social social media platform late last month.
His rhetoric may be as much about cleaning up his own record as it is about attacking Biden’s.
Meanwhile in court…
The criminal trial accusing Trump of covering up a sex scandal to protect his 2016 presidential campaign is in full swing in a Manhattan courtroom. As prosecutors laid out their case, Trump was threatened with prison, watched a longtime former associate testify against him and listened to secretly recorded audio in court.
Here are three key testing developments you may have missed:
Source link
2024-05-06 22:36:07
www.nytimes.com
