In the midst of tragedy—as in Baton Rouge, in Minnesota, and, now, in Dallas—there is always the human instinct to grasp for words and images that might help construct a barrier against internal despair and social chaos. Maybe we can find that strength in the poise of Diamond Reynolds, just seconds into her nightmare, recounting the outrageous assault against her boyfriend, Philando Castile, even as he bleeds to death next to her in the front seat and a gun is pointed in her direction. Maybe we can find it in a photograph taken at the anti-violence rally in Dallas of a black protester holding a sign reading, “No Justice, No Peace”; he is flanked by two smiling police officers, one white, one black. And now, on Sunday morning, we watch police officers and citizens of Dallas, black and white, grieving together over the senseless murder of five officers.
The events of the past week have provoked rage and the prospect of widespread unrest in this country; news reports are flecked with references to the upheavals of the nineteen-sixties. Some forces seem almost to relish the prospect. “Black Lives Kill” was one headline on Matt Drudge’s Web site.
Meeting the need to explain, to console, and to frame such tragedy in the realm of national politics—as well as in that of emotion—is the task of the President of the United States. Indeed, in a country awash in hundreds of millions of firearms, it is a major part of his job description. Barack Obama has now played this role many times, and each iteration of that sorrowful duty clearly hollows his soul. Each time he takes to the microphone—twice in twelve hours while attending a nato meeting, in Warsaw, this week—Obama seems to speak ever more slowly, more gravely, as if to mask the sadness and the acrid frustration within. Few spectacles in American life seem darker or more futile than that of the President stepping forward yet again to ask for sane legislation on gun control, for reform in police behavior and training, for greater awareness of the racial disparities that characterize the United States in 2016, and, above all, for empathy: with officers of the law, who face danger every day in their jobs; with people of color, whose lives are, for all the reasons we know, more endangered than white Americans’ when they walk the streets or get behind the wheel of a car.
On Saturday, Obama did all he could to calm the country’s collective temper and head off the idea that there was “this enormous polarization” in America. “You’re not seeing riots and you’re not seeing police going after people who are protesting peacefully,” he said. He added that he believed there to be a “foundation” for Americans to build on, “as tough, as hard, as depressing” as the events of the week had been. “We just have to have confidence that we can build on those better angels of our nature,” Obama said.
Nevertheless, despite the flagrant care Obama takes with his language, some reactionary politicians and their media followers often talk about these appearances as constituting a “war on the police.” Among the most lurid examples this time around came from Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman from Illinois and now a radio talk-show host. After the news came from Dallas, Walsh took to Twitter (his handle is @WalshFreedom) and wrote, “This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you.” Walsh, after sensing public queasiness about his analysis, deleted that tweet, but his other utterances on the same medium still stand. They include the phrase “Wake up silent majority” and the assertion that Black Lives Matter “should be categorized as a hate group.” Talking to the Chicago Tribune, Walsh denied that he was inciting violence or threatening the President, and yet he said, “There’s a war against our cops in this country, and I think Obama has fed that war and Black Lives Matter has fed that war. … Obama’s words and the deeds of Black Lives Matter have gotten cops in this country killed.”
In fact, Obama, before the Dallas shootings, made clear in the first of his statements in Warsaw that to be critical of police abuses and to cite evidence of racism in no way constitutes an anti-police campaign. Rather it is a call for reform, for legislation, for more training, and for deeper understanding. Obama exhibited respect for law-enforcement officials—for the vast majority of officers who do their difficult job with care and respect. But, he said, “If communities are mistrustful of the police, that makes those law-enforcement officers who are doing a great job, who are doing the right thing, it makes their lives harder.” He continued, “When people say ‘black lives matter,’ that doesn’t mean blue lives don’t matter. … But right now the big concern is the fact that the data shows black folks are more vulnerable to these kinds of incidents. … There is a particular burden that is being placed on a group of our fellow-citizens.”
As a state senator in Springfield, Illinois, Obama worked on these issues. Calling on the testimony of both civil-liberties groups and police associations, he helped craft anti-racial-profiling measures to combat the phenomenon of officers pulling over disproportionate numbers of black and Hispanic motorists. It was also part of his personal experience. Speaking last year, in Chicago, to a gathering of fourteen thousand police chiefs, Obama recalled, “There were times when I was younger and maybe even as I got a little older, but before I had a motorcade, where I got pulled over. … Most of the time I got a ticket, I deserved it. I knew why I was pulled over. But there were times where I didn’t. And as a report that came out just this week reminded us, there are a lot of African-Americans, not just me, who have that same kind of story of being pulled over, or frisked, or something. And the data shows that this is not an aberration. It doesn’t mean each case is a problem. It means that when you aggregate all the cases and you look at it, you’ve got to say that there’s some racial bias in the system.”
(My colleague Jelani Cobb recently helped write a PBS “Frontline” documentary on just these issues. It is set in Newark and called “Policing the Police.” Calm, questioning, fair-minded, yet impassioned, the program portrays a community that is often at odds with its salaried protectors. Cobb, along with James Jacoby and Anya Bourg, provide an extremely rounded portrait of the Newark Police Department and its relations with the community. With Cobb and a crew riding in the back seat as Newark cops patrol the streets at night, we get a clear sense of how tense and difficult the job of policing is but, also, how the officers feel justified in routinely treating people, particularly young men of color, as innately suspect and armed. I can’t recommend it more highly—especially now.)
Obama’s temperament will be greatly missed. Unfortunately, temperament and eloquence, as he would be the first to admit, have not been adequate to the task—not in this miserable political ecosystem. Neither his marshalling of the facts nor his measured emotion have dissuaded the N.R.A. caucus of the U.S. Congress from its immoral refusal to enact gun laws that would begin to make a priority of the safety of the American people.
After Dallas, Obama denounced the shootings, calling the attack “vicious, calculated, and despicable” and a “wrenching reminder” of the sacrifices and dangers experienced by police officers. And yet, on Friday morning, William Johnson, the executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, a lobbying group representing more than a quarter of a million officers, went on Fox News and declared, “It’s a war on cops, and the Obama Administration is the Neville Chamberlain of this war. I think their continued appeasement at the federal level with the Department of Justice, their appeasement of violent criminals, their refusal to condemn movements like Black Lives Matter, actively calling for the death of police officers, that type of thing, all the while blaming police for the problems in this country, has led directly to the climate that has made Dallas possible.”
Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican nominee for Vice-President and, in many ways, the precursor to the Donald Trump phenomenon, took to Facebook to call Black Lives Matter a “farce” and to say, “Media: quit claiming the rioters are ‘peaceful’ as they stomp on our flag, shout ‘death to cops!’ and celebrate violence. It is sick.”
By his own standards, Donald Trump’s statements on the violence in Baton Rouge, Minnesota, and Dallas had, as the weekend began, been remarkable mainly for how subdued they were. And yet it can’t be overlooked that these events come in the midst of a troubling election campaign in which Trump has done everything possible to arouse the worst instincts of many voters. His casual race-baiting, deliberate divisiveness, and stagey swagger are the last qualities the country needs in a leader—always, but now in particular.
Have you been watching Trump this past week? I mean, watching him in all his unbalanced fullness? To watch him is to wonder about his mental stability. After F.B.I. Director James Comey handed him the political birthday gift of declaring Hillary Clinton “extremely careless” in her use of government e-mail, Trump spent the public hours available to him talking about sheriff’s stars (the kind that just happen to look like the Star of David), golf, the terror-fighting goodness of Saddam Hussein, more golf, the amazingness of his businesses, the Wall, and mosquitoes. (“I don’t like mosquitoes! I don’t like those mosquitoes! I never did! O.K., speaking of mosquitoes—hello, Hillary.”)
“Business is no place for stream of consciousness babbling, no matter how colorful you might think you’re being,” Trump “wrote” in one of his many ghosted books, “Think Like a Champion.” Inane, self-regarding improvisation, however, is just fine for a Presidential campaign.
The point is this: Trump is trailing Clinton in the polls, but it is still far from inconceivable that the country could wake up in November and discover that it has made a self-sabotaging mistake likely far more consequential than Brexit is for Britain.
Try to imagine Trump in moments of crisis and tragedy, like those in San Bernardino or Orlando or Baton Rouge or Dallas: the narcissism and infantile rages, the random facts, non-facts, and lies; the inconceivable outbursts. Imagine him behind a lectern while on a nato sojourn somewhere (the allied heads of state back in their hotel suites clutching their heads and emptying the minibars after a day of sickened bewilderment): there he is, the Commander-in-Chief, uttering his improvised remarks of calm, consolation, and direction. Donald Trump, possessed of the most erratic temperament imaginable, shows no sign of having spent fifteen minutes in his life thinking about the racial and legal problems at hand. The Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg may have the clearest sense of things. Asked by the Associated Press about the possibility of a Trump Presidency, she said, “I don’t want to think about that possibility, but if it should be, then everything is up for grabs.”