monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Protesters have been cleared from a park by tear gas, moments before US President Donald Trump marched through to a Washington DC church.

The forced removable of demonstrators from Lafayette Park, allowed Donald Trump to stage a walk to St John's Church following an address at the White House.

Moments before Mr Trump's address, US Secret Service agents, Park Police and National Guardsmen suddenly marched forward, directly confronting the protesters as many held up their hands, saying, "don’t shoot".

Law-enforcement officers then aggressively forced the protesters back, firing tear gas and deploying flash bangs into the crowd to disperse them from the park for seemingly no reason.

The park was cleared for the President, who walked through it minutes later to the church, for a photo opportunity in which he posed with a Bible.

Mr Trump, standing alone in front of cameras, raised the black-covered Bible for reporters to see.

"We have a great country," Mr Trump said. "Greatest country in the world."

Religious leaders slam Trump's 'lack of compassion'

The Right Reverend Mariann Budde, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, to which St John’s belongs, said she was "outraged" by the moment and noted that Mr Trump didn't pray during his visit.

"He took the symbols sacred to our tradition and stood in front of a house of prayer in full expectation that it would be a celebratory moment," Rev Budde told The Associated Press.

"There was nothing I could do but speak out against that."

Rev Budde said the church was "just completely caught off-guard" by the visit, with "no sense that this was a sacred space to be used for sacred purposes".

In order to facilitate Mr Trump's statement there, she said, she believed tear gas was used in the area between the White House and the church.

Rabbi Jack Moline, the president of Interfaith Alliance, slammed the fact peaceful protesters near the White House were gassed and shot with rubber bullets so Mr Trump could hold his photo opportunity.

"Seeing President Trump stand in front of St John’s Episcopal Church while holding a Bible in response to calls for racial justice — right after using military force to clear peaceful protesters out of the area — is one of the most flagrant misuses of religion I have ever seen," Rabbi Moline said in a statement.

"This only underscores the President's complete lack of compassion for Black Americans and the lethal consequences of racism."

Biden, Pelosi, call clearing of Lafayette Park a disgrace

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden accused the President of "using the American military against the American people".

"He tear-gassed peaceful protesters and fired rubber bullets. For a photo," he tweeted.

Meanwhile. US Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said the actions against protesters were a dishonor to "every value that faith teaches us".

Officers withdrawn from Washington DC

Police officers from Arlington, Virginia, which borders Washington DC, have been withdrawn from the national capital.

In a statement released to media on Monday night local time, administrators and the police chief ordered their officers to cross the Potomac River and return to Arlington.

An arrangement between Arlington and Washington DC, allowed the Virgina-based officers to police the city, however the safety concerns led to the withdrawal.

"At the direction of the County Board, County Manager and Police Chief, all ACPD officers left the District of Columbia at 8:30 tonight," the statement read.

"The County is re-evaluating the agreements that allowed our officers to be put in a compromising position that endangered their health and safety, and that of the people around them, for a purpose not worthy of our mutual aid obligations."

(...)

In recent decades, which have been marked by continuous, disruptive change and by technological innovation that has reached assertively into every area of life, a particular economics has become a Theory of Everything, subordinating all other considerations to some form of cost-benefit analysis that silently insinuates special definitions of both cost and benefit. If neither of these is precisely monetizable—calories might have to stand in for currency in primordial transactions—personal advantage, again subject to a highly special definition, is seen as the one thing at stake in human relations. The profit motive has been implanted in our deepest history as a species, in our very DNA.

(...)

Much American unhappiness has arisen from the cordoning-off of low-income workers from the reasonable hope that they and their children will be fairly compensated for their work, their contribution to the vast wealth that is rather inexactly associated with this country, as if everyone had a share in it. Their earnings should be sufficient to allow them to be adequate providers and to shape some part of their lives around their interests. Yet workers’ real wages have fallen for decades in America. This is rationalized by the notion that their wages are a burden on the economy, a burden in our supposed competition with China, which was previously our competition with Japan. The latter country has gone into economic and demographic eclipse, and more or less the same anxieties that drove American opinion were then transferred to China, and with good reason, because there was also a transfer of American investment to China.

The terrible joke is that American workers have been competing against expatriated American capital, a flow that has influenced, and has been influenced by, the supposed deficiencies of American labor. New factories are always more efficient than those they displace, and new factories tend to be built elsewhere. And as the former presidential candidate Mitt Romney remarked, workers in China sleep in factory dormitories. Employing them in preference to American workers would sidestep the old expectation that a working man or woman would be able to rent a house or buy a car. The message being communicated to our workers is that we need poverty in order to compete with countries for whom poverty is a major competitive asset. The global economic order has meant that the poor will remain poor. There will be enough flashy architecture and middle-class affluence to appear to justify the word “developing” in other parts of the world, a designation that suggests that the tide of modernization and industrialization is lifting all boats, as they did in Europe after World War II.

(...)

All the talk of national wealth, which is presented as the meaning and vindication of America, has been simultaneous with a coercive atmosphere of scarcity. America is the most powerful economy in history and at the same time so threatened by global competition that it must dismantle its own institutions, the educational system, the post office. The national parks are increasingly abandoned to neglect in service to fiscal restraint. We cannot maintain our infrastructure. And, of course, we cannot raise the minimum wage. The belief has been general and urgent that the mass of people and their children can look forward to a future in which they must scramble for employment, a life-engrossing struggle in which success will depend on their making themselves useful to whatever industries emerge, contingent on their being competitive in the global labor market. Polarization is the inevitable consequence of all this.

The great error of any conspiracy theory is the assumption that blame can be placed on particular persons and interests. A chord is struck, a predisposition is awakened. America as a whole has embraced, under the name of conservatism and also patriotism, a radical departure from its own history. This richest country has been overtaken with a deep and general conviction of scarcity, a conviction that has become an expectation, then a kind of discipline, even an ethic. The sense of scarcity instantiates itself. It reinforces an anxiety that makes scarcity feel real and encroaching, and generosity, even investment, an imprudent risk.

(...)

The minimum wage has become the amount an employer can get away with paying. It is neither the amount a worker needs to sustain a reasonable life nor, crucially, to be important enough as a consumer for his or her interests to align with other interests. Because workers are underpaid, they are often treated as dependents, as a burden on the “safety net,” which is actually a public subsidy of the practice of underpayment. Workers often do not fall into the category of “taxpayer,” a word now laden with implication and consequence. It implies respectability, a more robust participation in citizenship, and, fairly or not, an extreme sensitivity to demands made on his or her assets for the public benefit. Equitable policies are often precluded in the name of the taxpayer so forcibly that the taxpayer—that is, a fair percentage of the public—is never really consulted. In this time of polarization, such language reflects an ugly, alienating division in our society, with bad faith at the root of it. Proud people are insulted, those same people we now call “essential” because they work steadily at jobs that are suddenly recognized as absolutely necessary.

As adapted for what was recently the present, this wealth is still a product of national policies—favorable taxation, imaginative banking regulations, and low production costs, including depressed wages and lowered safety and environmental standards. The cinch that tightens such slack as remains in the lives of the underpaid is called “austerity” or “fiscal discipline.” Austerity has not touched the beneficiaries of these arrangements, nor has fiscal discipline. These policies amount to continuous downward pressure on the accommodations made to the fact that wages are not sufficient to meet basic needs. “Austerity” and “discipline” retain their brisk, morally coercive force, amazingly. The work ethic persists through impoverishment, unemployment, deindustrialization driven by pools of cheap labor elsewhere, and the de-skilling that is the effect of all these declines.

(...)

And we have to get beyond the habit of thinking in terms of scarcity. We live in the midst of great wealth prepared for us by other generations. We inherited sound roads and bridges. Our children will not be so favored. Since the value of basic investments is not realized immediately, we cannot rationalize the expenditure. We are the richest country in history, therefore richer than the generations that built it, but we cannot bring ourselves even to make repairs. Our thrift will be very costly over time. The notion or pretense that austerity is the refusal to burden our children with our debts is foolish at best. But it is persuasive to those who are injured by it as surely as to those who look at a pothole and see a tax cut. Hiding money in a hole in the ground has seemed like wisdom to some people since antiquity. And there are many who are truly straitened and insecure, and are trusting enough to assume that some economic wisdom lies behind it. Legislators all over America, duly elected, have subscribed to this kind of thinking and acted on it.

(...)

. Bush signed this amendment into law, but some months after it was enacted, all 50 state governors issued a joint statement against it, and the changes were repealed in January 2008.[1]

Quote:

. Bush signed this amendment into law, but some months after it was enacted, all 50 state governors issued a joint statement against it, and the changes were repealed in January 2008.[1]

So as of right now, Trump has no power to order troops into states without the Governors request.

I'm guessing it won't stop him nor will it stop his supporters from defending it.

The whole strongman act was brought about because Trump got his feelings hurt with taunts about him hiding in the bunker. Now Trump is encouraging civil war with between those justifiable protesting and all the 2nd amendment nuts. What an awful time we live in.

Now Trump is encouraging civil war with between those justifiable protesting and all the 2nd amendment nuts.

In 2006, the George W. Bush administration considered intervening in the state of Louisiana's response to Hurricane Katrina despite the refusal from its governor, but this was inconsistent with past precedent, politically difficult, and potentially unconstitutional.[2]:73-75 In response, an amendment was made to the Insurrection Act by the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007 to explicitly allow any emergency hindering the enforcement of laws, regardless of state consent, to be a cause for use of the military. Bush signed this amendment into law, but some months after it was enacted, all 50 state governors issued a joint statement against it, and the changes were repealed in January 2008.[1]

Now Trump is encouraging civil war with between those justifiable protesting and all the 2nd amendment nuts. What an awful time we live in.

Trump grandstanding with a Bible in his hand making threats was a definite reaction to the widespread taunts of him being a coward hiding in his bunker.

While America goes up in flames he’ll be massing his tanks ready to move into Eastern Europe.

And a war the US started for purely imperialistic goals.

Riots Elected Nixon: They Will Reelect Trump

And in truth? The reality star president has already stolen the show with his remarks from the Rose Garden last night. Said the President to an American nation under siege from riots and racial violence: “I will fight to protect you.” He added: First, as reported here by Fox News:

“I have recommended every governor deploy the National Guard in sufficient numbers to dominate the streets,” the president said during his speech. “We are ending riots and lawlessness, we will end it today.”

Trump said he is dispatching “thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers and military personnel” to stop the rioting. “I want organizers of this terror to be on notice that you will face severe criminal penalties,” he said.

“We cannot allow the righteous cries of peaceful protesters to be drowned out by an angry mob,” the president added. “The biggest victims of this rioting are peace-loving citizens in our poorest communities.”

And with that, saying he would head instantly to a special place, he turned, walked back through the White House and dramatically walked to St. John’s Church across LaFayette Park from the White House. This is the church in Washington legend and lore known as the “Church of Presidents” where every president since James Madison has worshipped. It now stood wounded by rioters that had attempted to burn it to the ground. I personally have worshipped there. It is a cherished site of love and remembrance — and the Never Trump, anti-American haters literally tried to burn it to the ground. I can’t wait until the Never Trump haters of the Lincoln Project try and defend this.