Day 1,234: Trump touts police muscle as reason for diminshed crowds in D.C.; number of protesters actually skyrockets

As protests and marches for racial equality and against police brutality hit their second weekend, Donald Trump was keen on not spending any more time in the White House bunker.

So earlier this week, Trump had multiple additional layers of fencing surround the White House. He has also tried turning the city into a de facto military state, with more officers and high powered weapons around to scare off would-be protesters.

As for the latter, Trump seemed to indicate there was a “much smaller crowd in D.C. than anticipated” due to the ever-increasing police prescence.

Trump wants to be proud about thousands of armed personnel with eyes and guns trained on their own citizens in the nation’s capital. A president should be proud, instead, of those same citizens expressing their constitutionally-given First Amendment rights to assemble and speak up for causes they believe in.

But Trump’s claim — like others relating to crowd sizes in Washington — is also completely false.

Thousands of protesters from all walks of life — black, white, young, old, straight, gay — poured into downtown Washington Saturday to demand an end to police violence against African Americans.

It was the ninth — and by far the largest — day of demonstrations demanding justice for George Floyd, the black Minneapolis man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, and the many other black victims of police abuse.

Protesters gathered peacefully across Washington at the city’s most iconic sites — the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial and near the White House — for simultaneous marches and mass demonstrations.

Americans are fed up. About racial divisions (stoked by Donald Trump). About police brutality (supported by Donald Trump). About inequities in the justice system (backed by Donald Trump).

Trump isn’t the sole reason any of those things exist in the U.S. But he knows most of the protesters despise him, and his naked desire to get them out of the streets and off of TV will lead him to do whatever is necessary to accomplish those goals. If that means armed personnel intimidating people peacefully walking in the street, he’s all too giddy to use the military, Secret Service and other forces to do so.

1,234 days in, 228 to go

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