From this morning, you tweeted “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”.
How would you know that phrase and not know it’s racially charged history?
Well I’ve heard that phrase for a long time.
I don’t know where it came from or it originated, I view that phrase as--
In 1967, the Miami police chief used it--
Well, I don’t know.
I’ve also heard it from many other places but, I’ve heard it for a long time as most
people have.
Frankly it means, when there’s looting people get shot, they die, and if you look at what
happened last night and the night before you see that.
It’s very common.
And, that’s the way it was meant and that’s the way, I think, it was supposed to be meant.
I don’t know where it came from, I don’t know where it originated.
I wouldn’t know a thing like that but I will say, it’s very accurate in the sense
that when you do have looting, like you had last night, people often get shot, and they
die.
And that’s not good, we don’t want that to happen.
Well I think that police brutality, certainly, is something that we’ve been hearing about,
reading about, studying- I have for many years.
And, we all have to say, and I think most people would admit, most of the price men
and women that I’ve seen have been outstanding.
When you have something like this happen you look at it and you just say, how does a thing
like that happen?
Because it just seems so bad to watch.
Our police have been very outstanding.
Our crime rates are way down right now in this country.
And, way down, the police have done a great job.
Something like this happens you really say, that’s so bad in so many different ways
and so unfortunate.
Right right.
Trump had no idea the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” has racist
origins.
Interesting how whenever Trump doesn’t know what he just said, it always manages to be
something bigoted.
Funny how that works out.
If you’re wondering where that phrase comes from, Trump didn’t just miraculously conjure
it up through his rhetorical genius, it’s an infamous phrase by Miami’s police chief
in 1967 who led a brutal crackdown on black neighborhoods.
The police chief, Walter Headley, said quote, “We haven’t had any serious problems with
civil uprising and looting because I’ve let the word filter down that when the looting
starts, the shooting starts.”
Meaning if there’s civil unrest, they were going to kill them.
That wasn’t just the informal reality, it was the official policy.
“When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
And so it’s only fitting that Trump would use the exact same phrase as a notoriously
racist police chief in the 1960s when talking about unrest now in Minneapolis in the aftermath
of the death of George Floyd.
But of course, he didn’t know it was racist.
Just like I guess he didn't know telling the lineage of Henry Ford that they had good bloodlines
was rife with anti-Semitism.
Or that the guys with tiki torches at Charlottesville who he called “very fine people” just
so happened to be neo-Nazis.
Somehow the most vile phrases just miraculously end up falling out of his mouth and no one
has any clue how they get there.
How convenient.
Trump’s feud with Black protestors also came to a head with Trump’s feud with Twitter.
On Thursday evening, as protests were breaking out over the death of George Floyd, Trump
tweeted quote, “I can’t stand back & watch this happen to a great American City, Minneapolis.
A total lack of leadership.
Either the very weak Radical Left Mayor, Jacob Frey, get his act together and bring the City
under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right.
These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen.
Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way.
Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting
starts.
Thank you!”
Nothing like a casual “thank you-exclamation point” to cap off a brazen threat to murder
Americans using military force.
The tweet was then hidden by twitter, who put a label on top of it and noted that it
violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence.
And, predictably, that led to an avalanche of furious tweets by Trump in the morning.
And I’m not going to bother reading his tweets because it’s exactly the unhinged
ranting that you’d expect, but the fact that we already knew that Trump was going
to be more infuriated that his tweet glorifying the mass murder of American citizens got censored,
than he’s EVER gotten about more than a hundred thousand Americans needlessly dying
in just the last 12 weeks sums up this presidency perfectly.
Trump gave Twitter the reaction we’d expect a president to give to a global pandemic.
And he gave a global pandemic the response we’d expect a president to give to Twitter.
And look, Trump will try and play this off as if he innocently meant it as “looting
just EQUATES to people getting shot,” but come on now.
The meaning is clear and, more importantly, the people for whom this comment was meant
– the racists and bigots – know what he meant too.
As Andrew Gillum explained, it’s not a question of whether we think Trump is a racist.
It’s that the racists believe he’s a racist” And issuing these not-even-subtle but OVERT
dog whistles is exactly why.
So the mainstream media may delve into the usual parsing of his words and giving him
the benefit of the doubt and debating whether he knew what he meant, but the guys waving
confederate flags know exactly what he meant and so the damage is done.
His phrase was never an accident and any attempt by Trump to convince you that it was is him
not only being a racist, but a liar, as well.