Some folks in Michigan got so angry this week that they stormed into the State Capitol building in Lansing, packing AR-15s, M-4s and AK-47s — assault weapons — and demanded that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer reopen the state’s business community.
Yep, they assaulted one of our bastions of representative democracy!
And what was the response from the president of the United States? Donald Trump wants Gov. Whitmer to negotiate with them.
According to The Guardian: “These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely! See them, talk t them, make a deal.”
That statement came from Trump. I couldn’t help but think of what he said about the neo-Nazis, KKK members and white supremacists who confronted officials in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017; they instigated a riot over the taking down of Confederate statues, and a young woman was killed. Trump told us then that there were “very fine people, on both sides.”
Whitmer along with governors in many other states had shut down businesses and government offices in reaction to the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed 65,000 Americans and sickened more than 1 million of us. Whitmer is frightened of what the illness could do to the people she was elected to serve, so she acted.
Now we have demonstrators threatening the halls of power, brandishing weaponry into the State Capitol.
The president’s response was, quite naturally, disgraceful. He didn’t condemn the demonstrators for their show of intimidation. He didn’t counsel them to resist that kind of obnoxiousness. Trump didn’t pitch a more restrained response. Oh, no. He endorsed the mob scene; he gave them strength to continue their protests to lift the stay at home orders, the shelter in place restrictions, the social distancing that has proven to be effective in stemming the spread of the viral infection.
This isn’t leadership. Donald Trump is fomenting anger among a minority of Americans who are able to lift their voices above the majority of us who are concerned that governors in many states — such as Texas — might be moving too rapidly to “return to normal.”