Jackson rampant
Trump wants to see cruel and unusual punishment for people who make political gestures he dislikes.
Trump referred to the protesters who tried to tear down the Andrew Jackson statue near the White House as “vandals” and “hoodlums” who don’t love America.
“We are looking at long term jail sentences for these vandals and these hoodlums and these anarchists and agitators,” the president told reporters shortly before leaving for Arizona.
He wants people in prison for years for a minor property crime.
“Call them whatever you want. Some people don’t like that language, but that’s what they are. They’re bad people. They don’t love our country. And they’re not taking down our monuments. I just want to make that clear.”
Not his call. He’s not a god-emperor, he can’t stop us taking down monuments. They’re ours, not his, and we can collectively decide we don’t want monuments to genocide or slavery or Jim Crow.
Andrew Jackson was a genocider, so yes, there damn well is something very dubious about having a statue of him in Lafayette Park.
Granted, I don’t expect The Authorities to stand around and watch people destroy it, but that doesn’t make long prison sentences the appropriate response.
Pretty much exactly right. They are not the protesters’. They are ours. They belong to all of us, collective property of the nation as a whole. As such, whether they are taken down or not should be determined and executed by lawful processes. The alternative is licensing some sort of radically egoistic iconoclasm, which seems like an unwise direction.
Dammit. Messed up the blockquote. Curse you, lack of preview!
Seriously, I’d be willing to troubleshoot the site just to get the preview function back.
While the below doesn’t apply to Andrew Jackson, it’s food for thought about the wider context of Trumps dog whistle.