What Trump and Toxic Cops Have in Common – The New York Times

Yet there was Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, issuing a wee-hours statement that asked Americans not to ignore their pain, but to use it to compel our nation across this turbulent threshold into the next phase of progress, inclusion, and opportunity. There was Killer Mike, the rapper from Atlanta, reminding his fellow citizens, Atlantas not perfect, but were a lot better than we ever were, and a lot better than cities are.

Conservatives will focus on the pleas for law and order in their messages. But what I hear is a repudiation of Trumpian nihilism a rejection of the tyranny of the perpetual anxious present that Masha Gessen describes in her forthcoming book Surviving Autocracy. Theyre instead speaking with what Gessen calls moral ambition, inviting fellow citizens to build a more expansive country, rather than an us-versus-them one. Their messages werent, Dont destroy your community, so much as, Theres still a community left for you to join. Come and make it better.

And so, along with terrifying imagery of fire and fury, we also saw images over the weekend of police officers and protesters in solidarity. The bonds were sometimes fragile, only to later disappear. But they happened. In Flint, Mich. In Camden, N.J. In Coral Gables, Fla. In Santa Clara, Calif. In Ferguson, Mo. In Kansas City, Mo., where two cops, one white, held aloft a sign saying End Police Brutality.

Or listen to the chief of police in Atlanta, Erika Shields, tell an anxious protester, I hear you. When Trump met with those whod lost loved ones in the Parkland shooting, he needed an empathy cheat sheet that contained those very words; it was item No. 5. For her, they simply spilled out, as naturally as rain.

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What Trump and Toxic Cops Have in Common - The New York Times