A thug in the White House sets the tone for a divided America

A clear through-line connects the actions of the looters to those of the president of the United States. And the people of America are caught in the middle.

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President Donald Trump didn’t go to church on Monday to pray. He went to politically loot, the Sun-Times editorial board writes.

Brendan Smialowski/AFP

As looters robbed and burned businesses across the Chicago area on Monday, President Donald Trump walked out of the White House — his way cleared by riot police firing tear gas and rubber bullets at peaceful demonstrators — to a battered church to stage a tough-guy photo-op.

And with that, we had a disturbing thought: A clear through-line connects the actions of the looters to those of the president of the United States.

The looters and Trump both are taking a national moment of legitimate grief and outrage over the police killing of an African American man in Minneapolis, George Floyd, and hijacking it for terrible, selfish gain.

The looters want to burn a building, grab a case of liquor or make off with a pair of shoes. The president wants to wreck our democracy, turn us against each other, stoke the fires of his political base and improve his chances of reelection on Nov. 3.

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One thug roams the streets. The other lives in the White House. 

And the people of America are caught in the middle. Divided we fall.

Instigator-in-chief

We need real presidential leadership to address the civil unrest and violence flaring up across the country — and the reasons behind it — and urge us all to listen to our better angels.

What we have instead is an instigator-in-chief, a president whose approach is about as constructive as a Molotov cocktail hurled through a shopkeeper’s window.

How else to explain how Trump emerged from his bunker below the White House on Monday, after two days of no words of healing, and made an outright threat to use the formidable U.S. military to put down disturbances?

The president said he would mobilize “all available federal resources — civilian and military — to stop the rioting and looting, to end the destruction and arson, and to protect the rights of law-abiding Americans, including your Second Amendment rights.”

That statement is telling.

It scares us.

Trump sees — or pretends to see — this as a matter of protecting people’s right to bear arms. Where he gets that, we have no idea. What’s really under fire, from people like him, is the First Amendment — the right of Americans to assemble and speak freely at a time of great unrest.

Trump did not pray. He did not offer a word of balm or condolence to those who are grieving. He did not seek to unify the country.

Trump is a wannabe strong man looking to aggregate ever more power under his own roof, rather than working with governors and mayors for real solutions to the violence.

Trump’s words and actions most certainly have nothing to do with George Floyd or ending the kind of racist policing that took Floyd’s life. If anything, he has been egging on the racism, mayhem and lawlessness.

That’s why Gov. J.B. Pritzker deserves praise for taking Trump to task on Monday during a White House conference call with the nation’s governors.

“We’ve called out our National Guard and our state police, but the rhetoric that’s coming out of the White House is making it worse,” Pritzker told Trump. “And I need to say that people are feeling real pain out there and we’ve got to have national leadership in calling for calm and making sure that we’re addressing the concerns of the legitimate peaceful protesters. That will help us to bring order.”

Trump’s snide and weak-kneed response?

“OK, well thank you very much J.B.,” he said. “I don’t like your rhetoric much either because I watched it with respect to the coronavirus. . . . I think you could’ve done a much better job, frankly.”

Yes, well, speaking of the coronavirus, Trump’s actions now are almost an exact replay of his leadership failures when the pandemic hit. 

Trump failed to rally the nation when COVID-19 struck. He originally downplayed the virus when he should have been encouraging Americans to listen to medical experts and do their part to fight its spread. 

He abdicated his role as a leader and left governors to head the fight. And then, unbelievably, he worked to undercut them, mocking their stay-at-home orders and refusing to wear a mask.

Now he’s doing it again, criticizing governors who refuse to crack down hard on protesters as “weak” and threatening to send in federal troops.

‘He did not seek to unify’

When Trump rolled out of his White House hiding spot Monday, gave his Second Amendment talk and posed in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, he attempted to appropriate two of America’s most powerful symbols — the gun and the Bible — for entirely selfish political purposes.

That should give the nation pause, just as it did for an incensed Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of Washington’s Episcopal Diocese.

“He used violent means to ask to be escorted across the park into the courtyard of the church,” Budde told NPR’s Morning Edition.

“He held up his Bible after speaking [an] inflammatory militarized approach to the wounds of our nation,” she said. “He did not pray. He did not offer a word of balm or condolence to those who are grieving. He did not seek to unify the country.”

But Trump didn’t go to church to pray. He went to loot.

He showed little more of a moral compass than the thieves on Sunday who broke into 79 Nails, a salon on 79th Street, and stole almost everything in the place, including the cash register. 

“This is not protesting,” nail technician Lillian Wright told the Sun-Times. “This is looting.”

In time, a looter’s damage can be repaired. Or so we trust and hope.

Healing a brutalized democracy will prove much harder.

Send letters to letters@suntimes.com.

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