Trump “fuels racial violence”

by carlos matÍas

While in the United States race riots multiply due to police brutality against black citizens, Donald Trump bases his campaign saying that he represents “law and order.”
​But not even his own party believes him.

“Racial confrontations have occurred in the United States forever”, Alana Moceri, former president of the Democratic Party abroad, an international analyst and professor in Spain at the European University and the IE School of Global and Public Affairs, in Madrid, tells Sol de Medianoche. “But with Donald Trump these violent events have escalated”.
In a telephone conversation with this newspaper, Alana Moceri remembers the case of Rodney King, in Los Angeles, in 1992, to cite an episode from the last thirty years and without going back to the days of slavery or to the sixties, when Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.

#Black Lives Matter
For three decades, these riots had not been as massive and violent as they are now, except in July and August 2014 (Eric Garner and Michael Brown, respectively), with Democrat Barak Obama in the White House. It was during this period when the #Black Lives Matter movement against racism and police brutality emerged.

Today, #Black Lives Matter is once again the cry of protest, first over the death in Minneapolis of George Floyd (May 2020), suffocated by a policeman’s knee on his neck for endless minutes (“I can’t breathe”, “I can’t breathe”, Floyd shouted uselessly) and by the bullets in the back of another policeman to Jacob Blake, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on August 23rd.
Blake fights for his life today. Maybe he will make it out alive, but it would be a miracle if he walked again. The four bullets that hit his back, out of a total of seven shots at point-blank range by the policeman, have caused injuries to his spinal cord, spine, stomach, kidneys, and liver.
​Jacob Blake has also lost most of his colon and lacks intestinal and genital function. Even though he cannot move, he is permanently handcuffed to the hospital bed where he is still admitted.

Racists, Supremacists and “Patriots”
In Wisconsin, the birthplace of the Republican Party and where a police officer shot Jacob Blake, resides Victor Goldgel, an expert on Race and Ethnicity, political analyst and professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Goldgel accuses Trump of fueling racial violence in the United States: “he says that Joe Biden is going to bring violence, when the violence is produced by his own government”, he assured to the Argentine newspaper Clarín.

Victor Goldgel does not say if he is a Democrat or a Republican. But he reproaches Trump for praising, defending, and calling racists and white supremacists who shoot black protesters against police violence “patriots”. Racists and “patriotic” supremacists like the 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, a gun fanatic and Trump sympathizer, who on August 23 murdered three people (two protesters and the ‘skater’ Anthony Huber, who tried to prevent his gunshots) and wounded a third protester in the arm.
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For her part, the lawyer and strategist of the Republican Party Rocío Vélez has accused the histrionic resident of the White House of “shooting himself in the foot”; of damaging his own election campaign for “sending trivial, incoherent messages and attacking his opponent, Joe Biden, of being a socialist or far-left”; for not giving credit, or inspiring security, in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic; for neglecting social needs and for his “economic stimulus to the pockets of Wall Street” and not “to those who really need it”.

“Defund the Police”, “Redefine the Police”
Last June, Rocío Vélez published an article on CNN in Spanish that was highly critical of the public powers, institutions and political leaders of the United States, as well as ˗why not say it˗ a good part of the American citizenship. She denounced that both have relaxed excessively in their responsibilities for too long and have placed them “on the shoulders of the Police”, forced, for example, to intervene when a minor doesn’t attend school. “Where is the obligation of each household to look after the best interests of its members?”, asked Vélez.

The slogan “Defund The Police”, which has emerged after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, calls for the dismantling and withdrawal of funds for the police, due to their frequent abuses of power against minorities and the poorest in American society. But Rocío Vélez advocates an in-depth reform of the police forces, with agents better prepared for their true missions, an internal discipline that eradicates such abuses and, even, the involvement of unions in taking severe measures against those who commit them, that is, that they get involved in their eradication, instead of striving to cover them up.
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“Defund the Police” would then be reformulated as “Redefine the Police”. As former Democratic leader Alana Moceri tells Sol de Medianoche, “neither the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party propose to dismantle the Police. But their functions must be redefined, common sense applied and the proportionality of the use of force in their interventions should be regulated much better”.  ​