One of the low but illustrative points during the last week was the massive show of force by the various branches of the US security forces, including the military, in Washington DC to clear demonstrators out of Lafayette Square just across from the White House. And for what? Just to enable Trump to walk a couple of blocks and stand in front of a church and wave a Bible. What it really showed was the level of militarization of US law enforcement as it acted like an army in occupied territory.
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There are some signs that the solid Republican support that has enabled Trump to behave like a petulant tyrant is cracking after the appalling sights that we have witnessed in the past week or so following the murder of George Floyd. While we should welcome these defections, we should not start praising the defectors since these people were all Republicans and thus part of creating the rotten party that enabled Trump to become its leader. That is a stain that they cannot erase.

Alaska’s Republican senator Lisa Murkowski is publicly expressing her doubts about Trump. Mitt Romney and George W. Bush have reportedly said that they will not support Trump’s re-election. Bush has, however, denied reports published in the New York Times about his decision based on what some of his associates have told the media, though he has not said what he will do. His brother Jeb Bush has also not said what he will do, but both brothers and their parents said they did not vote for Trump in 2016. It is not clear if they would vote for Biden. Colin Powell has also said that he will vote for Biden, saying that Trump lies all the time, unlike of course Powell who only lies some of the time, like when he wanted to persuade the American public and the UN Security Council that Iraq should be invaded.
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Marina Fang writes about the fact that the current protests have been the occasion for many young Asian Americans to have sometimes uncomfortable conversations with their parents and other elders about racism in their community.

Anti-Black racism in Asian communities is tied to the “model minority” myth, which white political leaders, particularly in response to the civil rights movement in the 1960s, wielded in order to drive a wedge between Asian Americans and other people of color. Many Asian immigrants internalized that mentality, operating under the false impression that being a “good” immigrant could help them assimilate into whiteness and align themselves with white people.
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The widespread protests against police brutality have revealed clearly what some of us have known all along, that Trump is a paper tiger. After all his bombast demanding that governors use force to crush the demonstrations and that he would send in US troops if they did not, what has happened is that the protestors have largely ignored his threats and continue to demonstrate even in front of the White House and ignoring the curfew. The protests have been largely peaceful and when they were not, much of the violence was caused when police used force to attack demonstrators, as seen in numerous videos captured by bystanders.
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If there is one group that Trump must have thought would always be in his corner, it must be the National Football League. It is essentially a cartel consisting of 32 multimillionaire or billionaire owners of teams, some of whom are personal friends of his, who have no scruples about squeezing money for luxury stadiums and tax breaks from revenue-starved cities by threatening to move their teams elsewhere if they are not bought off. These owners are also almost all white and the football players, who are their employees, are largely black and the idea of white people in charge of black people must appeal to Trump and his fellow racists. Furthermore, the violence in football would appeal to soft, wimpy, bullies like Trump who can pretend to be tough by identifying with the players.
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In an earlier post on the outrageous levels of police brutality in the US, I said that it was not necessary to paint every police officer as a menace because of all these killings, and that all it took was for as few as 10% of the officers to be sociopaths for these abuses to be a regular feature. I just plucked that 10% figure out of thin air but later got curious about whether that was a reasonable estimate and decided to dig deeper.

Because of the highly local nature of US policing, it is not easy to get a figure for the total number of police officers all over the country but this blog says that “In 2008, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were 765,246 full-time police officers in the United States — roughly 251 police per 100,000 residents.” Given that there are about 18,000 police departments, that averages out to over 40 police per department, with a wide range depending on the size of the city.
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