• Direct Witness: The Taking of Washington by Donald Trump
  • Protests: Trump proclaims himself president of "law and order" and threatens to deploy the Army
  • George Floyd - Peaceful marches lead to looting one week after death
  • The death of George Floyd sparks protests and an unprecedented racial blaze: what's going on in the United States?

Donald Trump's threat to launch active Army troops - not the National Guard, as it has been until now - has not calmed the United States, despite the fact that a total of 60 million people live in cities under the curfew .

Meanwhile, political reaction to the president's attitude has been ambiguous, with his Republican co-religionists eluding openly support , sometimes openly surreal, as when Senators Rob Portman of Ohio and Mike Enzi of Wyoming avoided giving his opinion on NBC television because "we were late for a meal", while his colleague Mitt Romney declared that "I did not pay much attention" to the photo the president took of the Bible next to the church of St. John's .

The Democratic opposition has condemned what for that party's candidate for the White House, Joe Biden, is an attempt to "traffic in fear and division . " Trump's toughness has also sparked other negative reactions. Washington Catholic Archbishop Wilton Gregory called Trump's visit to the National Basilica "puzzling and outrageous," which, he said, "has been a manipulation carried out in a way that violates our religious principles."

EU High Representative for Foreign Policy Josep Borrell called the circumstances in which George Floyd died "abuse of power" and supported the peaceful protests. But support for Trump among his electoral base seems very solid . And also outside the US it has support. In Spain, Vox declared in a tweet "our support for Trump and the Americans who are seeing their Nation attacked by street terrorists protected by progressive millionaires." Trump, for his part, does not back down, and tweeted again, referring to himself in the third person, "Thank you, President Trump!"

But the protests continue. The peaceful, the violent, and the looting . Just hours after the head of state and government issued his warning and claimed that "I am your president of law and order," downtown Manhattan was the scene of mass looting. There are at least one dead - in Las Vegas -, two critically ill police officers - in Las Vegas and in New York -, and four wounded by gunshots - in St. Louis -, while six other officers have been arrested in Atlanta for dragging Outside the car in which two black students were traveling, beat them, attack them with pistols that produce electric shocks, and break the vehicle's windows with their batons. A Los Angeles shopping mall has been looted and burned down.

Demonstrations, riots and police officers run over in a new day of outrage in the US

In some cities violence has decreased. That was the case in Minneapolis , which has been the scene of massive looting and fires after the murder of the African-American George Floyd, who last Monday was suffocated by police Derek Chauvin, in a brutal incident that has caused this wave of riots, protests and Looting that has claimed at least 7 lives, in what constitutes the largest wave of racial tension in the United States since the murder of civil rights leader Martin Luther King 52 years ago.

In Washington , violent protests and looting subsided significantly on a night as Army Black Hawk helicopters flew low over the city to create gales and eddies that forced protesters to disperse. But this morning, the peaceful protesters returned to the Plaza de Lafayette, in front of the White House, from where they had been expelled with tear gas grenades and rubber bullets on Monday at six-thirty in the afternoon. Authorities had built a large fence more than three meters high to block the view of the White House from the plaza.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump continued his dialectical offensive against protesters and looters . In a tweet, the president described people, the vast majority of whom are African-American, as "scum" and "rabble", judging by the videos on the internet, which looted Manhattan. The head of state and government also accused Biden's campaign team on this social network of "working to get the Anarchists (sic) out of jail, and probably more", and hung, in capital letters, the message "MAJORITY SILENT ".

That is an expression that dates back to the 19th century but in reality everyone identifies with President Richard Nixon, who used it in 1969 to criticize protesters who opposed the Vietnam War . The idea behind these two words is that there is a great majority of the population that instead of demonstrating works and supports the Government, but that never appears in the media. In an irony of history, the generation that protested not to go to fight Vietnam 51 years ago is now the core of Trump voters.

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