When a President encourages people to protest, when he agrees they are being deprived of their liberty and the result is they show up carrying guns, it would take very little for the situation to escalate.
If law enforcement arrives with orders to disperse the protesters are you 100% certain one of the gun toting protesters won’t resist in some way? Maybe a shot is fired.
Shit would escalate very very quickly. What DJT wants, expects or hopes will happen is irrelevant in that case.
Yeah, it would. Basically, that would be a “Kent State” moment. It could spark another Oklahoma City type response. (Today is the anniversary of that, BTW).
It also wouldn’t surprise me if there were some sparks growing out of a fed/state confrontation about pandemic supplies.
That all would be a more pressing concern with a normal president, but this is a game that Trump and his supporters have been playing for years now. You saw those “protesters.” Some of them actually were wearing masks. That belies the whole thing. This is recreational outrage for them–stress on the recreational. At some point their stupidity comes up to a wall.
Yes, it’s very true that from time to time there is the guy who takes it all the way–who drives a train into a parking lot, or something like that. And I agree, of course that’s bad. I think one or two of the Bundy people did that. But that’s an extremely low number compared to the total who are engaged in these theatrics. Deep down they know they’re not going to win a violent encounter. Deep down they know that they benefit from the system overall as much as anyone else. They just like to play with their guns and pretend they’re in an action movie, because for most, that’s the fantasy that their guns are for.
So yeah–I’m not missing your point at all, nor saying this behavior isn’t risky. I’m just saying this is the same old game that Trump and many of his supporters play.
There’s also the fact that a lot of people are, justifiably, outraged at these protests. What if somebody gets so angry at them that they shoot a protestor? In other words, it doesn’t have to be the gun-toting MAGA types that fire the first shot. It’s enough that the first shot gets fired.
I actually don’t think the first shot will matter all that much. It’s the second time there’s shots fired at one of these protests, or the third, that will start to move things.
So far, the system seems to be holding despite the cracks, and maybe people are learning. But we’ve got 8 months to go with an increasingly desperate lunatic at the helm, so I’m not worried for now but I’m not sanguine about it, either.
I thought I’d revive this thread and see if anyone had any additional thoughts based on the current protests. I don’t see a breakup of the US, but the prospect of a civil war seems to have gone from vanishingly unlikely to not terribly likely.