Trump is Not to Blame For The Mayhem

By Blake Fleetwood 

Trump is not to blame for the riotous protests that profoundly shook up the foundation of our democracy on January 6th.

Most of my friends want his bloody head on a spike paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue.

No doubt, Trump recklessly fanned the flames that led 60,000 disgruntled supporters to storm the Capitol. Some succumbed to the madness of the crowd and rushed in.

But looking at what actually happened, the protests were not much worse than usual run-of-the-mill protests, only bigger. There have been many smaller protests inside the Capitol before which included sit-ins and attempts to crowd into congressional offices.

The size of the protests reminds me of Chicago 1968 when 50,000 angry anti-war protesters gathered to stop the democratic nomination of Hubert Humphry for president.

Professionally, I was there for five days as a “reporter”. Personally, I was there as a Robert Kennedy supporter and demonstration junkie. I had written an 87-page undergraduate scholarly thesis on student protests.

Watching the recent Aaron Sorkin movie, The Trial of the Chicago 7, I was both entertained and transported back to Lincoln Park, where Chicago police infiltrated the protestors, instigated some of the violent actions, and brutally beat up crowds of peaceful protestors without provocation.

One afternoon, I was driving by a protest in Lincoln Park in my green MG sports car convertible when a bloody body splayed himself on my windshield. I was terrified until I realised it was my younger brother Francis, his whole face covered with blood blinding him. 

He, like thousands of other peaceful protestors, was beaten up by the Chicago cops in a “Police Riot”, as one commission concluded years later.

I was there, saw it happen firsthand, and narrowly escaped police batons myself.

The cops were acting at the behest of Mayor Richard Daley who ironically was trying to get Humphry elected president over Republican nominee Richard Nixon by trying to present Chicago as a city that could keep the peace. 

The result was just the opposite. Nixon was elected by a one percent margin on a “Law And Order” platform, permanently disrupting the New Deal coalition that had dominated American politics since 1932.

Last week, the Capital police were downright gentile compared to the thuggish Chicago police in 1968.

The Capitol police reminded me of the campus security guards at Columbia in 1968 when anti-war students overran them and occupied five Columbia buildings for more than a week. As a reporter of course, (I was also a student), I went in with them and slept on comfortable couches in the president’s Grayson Kirk’s Office at Low Library with 30 other students. We smoked Kirk’s Cuban cigars and sipped his bottle of expensive Madeira.

Despite our fun, we were careful about Grayson Kirk’s possessions, his fine antiques and art, including a $4 million Vincent van Gogh painting. Eventually we called security and told them to get the painting out of there. We were, after all, children of the elite.

A week later, 1,000 New York city riot cops came in to clear the buildings. They were not gentle, and routinely bloodied faculty, bystanders and students alike. They smashed everything that the students had been so careful about and blamed it on the demonstrators in the president’s office. 

In contrast, last week  I applauded the Washington Capitol police who were remarkably polite with the mostly peaceful crowd that surged through the halls of Congress. They took selfies with the protestors, some wore MAGA caps and seemed to be enjoying themselves. Hey, we are all human.

One cop did get nervous and shot to death a peaceful protestor, a young military vet and mother, Ashli Babbitt, who was being pushed through a window, but that was an isolated event. 

A History of Mayhem

Mayhem in Washington is not unprecedented. In 1824, a “straight-shooting outsider”, Andrew Jackson (reported to be Donald Trump’s favorite president) was cheated out of the presidency by chicanery in Congress, even though he had the most votes. He resolved to come back in the next cycle and did.

In 1829, Andrew Jackson won the presidency by appealing to the masses and claiming to represent the people, not the elites.

After his inauguration, tens of thousands of his followers, “dirty people with mud on their boots who should not have been there, stormed the White House breaking through barriers and climbing in windows. The crowd grabbed drinks to the point that tables were overturned and expensive glassware shattered.”

Sounds like the wildest party ever.

“The living mass was impenetrable,” wrote Margaret Bayard Smith, a Washington socialite and author. “Country men, farmers, gentlemen, mounted and dismounted, boys, women and children, black and white….But what a scene did we witness!”. 

“The Majesty of the People had disappeared, and a rabble, a mob, of boys, negros [sic], women, children, scrambling, fighting, romping. What a pity, what a pity!”

Newly elected president Andrew Jackson was only able to avoid the drunken rabble by leaving much earlier by a window, escaping to Gadsby’s Hotel in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia. 

The White House Chief Steward came to the rescue. He was finally able to lure the drunken mob out of the building by placing the whiskey-laced punch on the White House lawn. 

Maybe this tactic would have worked with the mob last week?

Jackson’s presidency was a mass of contradictions according to biographer James Parton. “he was dictator or democrat, ignoramus or genius, Satan or saint.” Yet in the last sixty years, Jackson always ranked in or near the top ten presidents in polls of historians and political scientists. ^[2

But seriously, back to the present

The root causes of the Capitol breaching are much deeper than Trump’s reckless incitements.

They have been burning for decades long before Trump even appeared on the political scene. 

Trump’s surprise outsider election win in 2016 —- and indeed even Obama’s election in 2008— is a reflection of the rage resulting from the significant material decline of ordinary Americans over the last forty years. Consider this:

• Americans born in the 1940s had a 92% chance of making more money than their parents. Millennials born in the 1980’s have only a 50% chance of doing the same. 

• Currently, the U.S. ranks 27th worldwide in upward economic mobility.

It is no surprise that the majority from both the left and the right want to make America great again.

They wanted an outsider: Trump, Obama, anyone and someone who would shake up the status quo, someone who would keep us out of endless wars, clean out the swamp and end the cycle of crony capitalism. 

Trump’s rhetoric would have  fallen on deaf ears if a significant majority of the population had not suffered such material decline. His overall message to the white working class was clear: 40 years of neoliberal policies by both elite Republicans and Democrats have ignored the plight of the majority.

Today, democracy is under its greatest stress since the 1930’s. Seismic economic changes—exponential technological advancements, manufacturing’s labor-free innovations, and globalization—have produced unfathomable riches for a miniscule elite.

But this new wealth has not “trickled down” and has resulted in gross inequality for the many, triggering a dangerous time bomb that has broken the Golden Age of universal progress and dreams of upward mobility.

This majority has seen the American dream fast disappearing and they see no way out. In the last 12 months, the fortunes of the five richest Americans have increased by 270 billion dollars, while life brutalizes much of the rest of the population.

But don’t take it from me. Jaime Diamond, head of J.P.Morgan Chase, American’s largest bank said recently in the WSJ, “the last recession has made capitalism itself unstable.” He calls for fundamental reforms to save capitalism and bring some measure of equality to ordinary Americans. 

Former Goldman Sachs Chief Financial Officer Marty Chavez echoed the same warning about saving capitalism: “You don’t want inequality to become so extreme that it leads to a revolution.” 

Since 1978, real earnings for ordinary people without a college degree have declined.

This is in sharp contrast from the period 1933 to 1973, spurred by such government investments and a political will, the Gross Domestic Product grew by 5% annually, creating a broad American middle class. While average earnings quadrupled, the top 1% experienced a personal wealth decline from 48% in 1933 to 22% in the late 1970’s.

Today, our democratic-capitalist system is under its greatest stress since the 1930’s. Seismic economic changes—exponential technological advancements, manufacturing’s labor-free innovations, and globalization—have produced unfathomable riches for a miniscule elite.

But this new wealth has not “trickled down” and has resulted in gross inequality for the many, triggering a dangerous time bomb that has broken the social pact of universal progress.

Make no mistake: Donald Trump is a symptom, not a cause. He is a product of the same underlying forces that are destabilizing our democracy.

If we don’t address this pathological inequality,  we will be forced to contend with a new and perhaps more poignant politician who can more successfully exploit the disgruntlement and anger that is afflicting so many ordinary people.