The White House is increasingly - and worryingly - using the military as a shield against criticism
Source: Washington Post
The White House is increasingly — and worryingly — using the military as a shield against criticism
By Philip Bump October 20 at 3:29 PM
As questions about his handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico started to mount, President Trump took up a new cause on Twitter: Opposition to the protests taking place before NFL games. He keeps coming back to that issue, time and again, clearly both because he believes that the protests are inappropriate and because he’s seen that it’s effective at whipping up support from his base.
Over time, though, the Trump administration’s narrative about those protests got distilled down into something fairly distant from the protesters’ intent. The point of the protests was to draw attention to systemic racism and law enforcement behavior in the United States. Trump and Vice President Pence, though, repeatedly suggested it was about disrespect for the flag and, more specifically, for the military.
The rationale for this reframing of the protests is pretty clear. A protest against police killing unarmed black men is a complicated and nuanced thing. A protest against the flag (or “Flag,” in Trump’s preferred capitalization) and against the military is a political winner. People have enormous respect for the military and America’s servicemembers — far more than they have for most politicians and certainly Trump. Last year, Pew Research found that the military was one of the most trusted groups of civic leaders in the country — especially among older Americans and Republicans. So by making the question “Are you for or against our troops?” it’s much easier for Trump to get people to take his side, especially among his base.
As it turns out, this would actually be the month’s less-egregious attempt to leverage the military for Trump’s political ends.
This week has devolved into five days of fighting over what is normally a deeply uncontroversial issue: respect for those who gave their lives in service to the country. Trump himself kicked off the tension on Monday, when he replied to a question about four soldiers killed in Niger by suggesting that his failure to have addressed the subject previously (the deaths happened more than two weeks ago) was ameliorated by his going above and beyond to call the families of those killed — something other presidents didn’t do. In short order, it was pointed out that past presidents had done so.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/10/20/the-white-house-is-increasingly-and-worryingly-using-the-military-as-a-shield-against-criticism/
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