Sound and fury signifying sound and fury over Trump’s DC takeover
Strutting and fretting on the stage
Jeffrey Denny
Why do the protests against Trump’s Takeover Theater in Washington, DC, which is 55% people of color, seem dominated by people of white?
So ask the bravest hearts since Braveheart about this fight for freedom against occupation. They’re the DC residents who dare to pose this obvious but politically awkward question on social media, using their real names, as they brace for huffy backlash.
It’s not their imagination — many news photos from the Free DC front lines show less diversity in the protestors than in the National Guard they’re protesting.
The best response/rationalization the white protesters and their allies can summon is that people of color are afraid of law enforcement, so white people have to protest on their behalf. Ah — the burden of privilege wrapped in the righteous, self-satisfied virtue that fuels the white savior complex. Think Sandra Bullock saving a poor Black athlete in “The Blind Side.”
The whites heavily populating the DC rallies and posts tend to be elders reliving their ‘60s and ‘70s protest glory days, and youth flexing their progressive agency. It’s fair to presume they’re college-educated, and as such, privileged. Many live in expensive, mostly white communities. Thus, they’re the least affected by crime and Trump’s fake crime-fighting.
I live in DC and have been all around the city over the past month, except for the downtown federal zone and tourist traps, which I always avoid. Elsewhere in this smallish, 68-square-mile city, I’ve yet to see a single National Guard woman or man. Certainly not in the majority white wards where many protestors — especially the elders — live.
Family members from South Carolina were in town for the weekend. They were concerned their governor was sending the Tar Heel Guard to DC. As we ventured forth, what they saw did not square with what they heard. There was no sign of an “occupying military force” or “police state,” despite the breathless rhetorical flights of the chronic Cassandras.
Here’s a sample: “I would’ve never imagined having the National Guard in place in this town terrorizing people,” a woman told the local NBC affiliate.
Per her LinkedIn profile, she’s a white private college grad with a master’s from another costly private university. She’s pursuing an evidence-based career improving lives.
Yet she and others like her ignore evidence that the National Guard is sworn to protect her, probably earns less than her, and isn’t “terrorizing people.” Other than hothouse progressives who don’t know any fellow Americans who serve the country in uniform and would rescue her in a natural disaster.
Evidence says DC Guard women and men, mostly people of color, are making nonwhite residents affected the most by crime feel safer, even if they hate Trump and his takeover. While the Guard is also picking up trash because climate nonprofit staffers are too busy raising money to save their organizations that save the planet.
As a highly educated person, this person should know better. And that military occupation in a police state terrorizing people is very real in China, North Korea, Iran, Russia, Afghanistan, and other actual totalitarian regimes.
Claiming this is happening in DC, or citing Hitler and the boiling frog syndrome, is not just gross exaggeration by the comfortable class; it borders on mocking real victims.
Sorry if I’m being a bit snarky about my fellow liberals. Hyperbole is contagious. That’s my problem with the protests.
Washington’s elite white liberals, old and young, who fulminate and catastrophize about Trump’s actions are wholly unaffected by them.
We have the armchair luxury to strut and fret about the meaning. It’s amusing how white liberal men who marched for BLM denounce the mayor, a Black single mom with no power against Trump, for “capitulating” to prevent a complete takeover and protect Home Rule.
Yet her critics offer no better strategies except marching, chanting, banging pots, dehumanizing the Guard, and “standing against tyranny.”
During one rally, a reporter asked a white lad walking with his dad while holding a giant inflatable hoagie — a tribute to “Sandwich Thrower” Sean Charles Dunn — why he was there. “Because I like this sandwich,” he said, “And I like to protest.”
Trump’s takeover is pure theater. Progressive theater, however self-satisfying, is not the answer; working to take back Congress is. Go to Cook Political Report, pick a vulnerable Republican, do everything you can to support his Democratic opponent, and make the sound and fury matter.
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer.
