The United States has seen days on end of nationwide protests against police brutality, and President Donald Trump has responded to the demonstrations by, quite literally, threatening more brutality. He has threatened to send the military into the streets of the U.S. to confront the protesters, whose mission he doesn’t happen to care for. In stark contrast, Utah Republican Senator Mitt Romney, who is a frequent Trump critic, issued a reminder this weekend for Americans to work to root out problems including the widespread racism that has preceded some of the recent protests turning into riots.
Mitt Romney:”I respect those who have protested, who have demanded that we must address racism & brutality.-the protesters -were orderly & nonviolent. They should not have been removed-particularly when the apparent purpose was to stage a photo op.” https://t.co/9ACE1XGfoN
— Mia Farrow (@MiaFarrow) June 4, 2020
Trump would rather dispatch the military and ignore the many, many protesters who are entirely peaceful. Alongside a photo of his late father, Romney countered:
‘This is my father, George Romney, participating in a Civil Rights march in the Detroit suburbs during the late 1960s—“Force alone will not eliminate riots,” he said. “We must eliminate the problems from which they stem.”’
This is my father, George Romney, participating in a Civil Rights march in the Detroit suburbs during the late 1960s—“Force alone will not eliminate riots,” he said. “We must eliminate the problems from which they stem.” pic.twitter.com/SzrcAyfPD8
— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) June 6, 2020
That’s a level of nuance that would, at this point, be pretty outrageous to expect from the current president, Donald Trump, who has wound himself up into a seemingly endless frenzy over the supposed threats posed by interests like Antifa, who are supposedly behind the supposedly widespread rioting. Antifa isn’t even a centralized organization — it just means “anti-fascist.” Technically, the U.S. troops who fought in World War II were Antifa. The seemingly forever willfully ignorant Trump never seems to grasp that nuance, either.
The American Civil Liberties Union files lawsuit against the Trump administration, alleging officials violated the civil rights of protesters forcefully removed from a park by police using chemical agents before the president walked to a nearby church. https://t.co/GhlizinU4Z
— The Associated Press (@AP) June 5, 2020
For now, Trump seems to have had his ambitions curtailed to use force against protesters at a greater rate than is seen presently. Some governors have dispatched their state National Guards, but none of them have apparently either requested or received the active-duty military back-up that the president seems eager to turn against American citizens.
Since we're back on the Antifa thing, some context:
The FBI finds ‘no intel indicating Antifa involvement’ in Sunday’s violence https://t.co/RCRhuCxEy3
How ‘antifa’ became a Trump catch-allhttps://t.co/7haymAEXlR
— Jane Lytvynenko 🤦🏽♀️🤦🏽♀️🤦🏽♀️ (@JaneLytv) June 4, 2020
(Featured Image was edited; original via Gage Skidmore on WikiMedia Commons, available under a Creative Commons License.)
Check out Twitter’s response to Romney below:
