Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser isn’t especially bright, but she’s also not dumb, and so she likely understands the basic correlation between the degree of peace in her city over the past week and the heightened presence of law enforcement.
After three nights of rioting, bonfires, and looting last week, the city’s order was restored. All it took was for President Trump to force the National Guard into Bowser’s territory and post up on every other corner downtown.
Once that happened, almost as if by miracle, all those “peaceful protests” over the death of George Floyd we’ve been hearing about went off without a hitch.
The first night of rioting in D.C. was on Saturday, May 30. Protesters hurled bottles at police, convenience stores were mobbed, and high-end retail outlets and restaurants had their windows smashed.
The next day, Bowser instituted an 11 p.m. curfew which did nothing but clear the streets for more chaos. Trash cans and piles of debris were set ablaze. A fire was lit inside the lobby of an AFL-CIO building, and so was a church, the same one where Trump would later visit for his photo-op.
Then Bowser got serious. The next day, Monday, she ordered another curfew, and this time it would start at 7 p.m., just so that it was clear she meant business. That night a cop car was torched, and more stores in Chinatown were broken into and burglarized.
On Tuesday, finally, the National Guard rolled into town, and what do you know? Nothing remarkable happened that night.
The next day, touched by the newfound peace, Bowser pushed the curfew back to 11 p.m. again. And since then, there has been no need for a curfew, and all of the protests have gone swimmingly.
Bowser had it wrong. The peaceful protests didn’t happen in spite of the increased law enforcement. They were able to happen because of it.
When she was confronted with that fact on ABC’s This Week, she had no answer but couldn’t admit what anyone with functioning eyes could see.
“What [Trump] actually did, as you saw for the remaining days,” she said, “was turn out more people and more people who were there for peaceful protests.”
Maybe more people did turn out for the protests because of Trump, though I’m still not sure what he had to do with the death of Floyd or police brutality in liberal cities such as Minneapolis. But that they were able to protest without turning into a rioting mob engaged in violence and vandalism is to the credit of the National Guard.
Sending in the Guard worked. Bowser and the protesters should be grateful.
