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Notes -
Whether Trump was meaningfully in charge of the executive branch during his first term is an open question, given the number of his theoretical subbordinates who have openly bragged about disobeying his orders, coordinating action with his opponents, and lying to him about it since.
My assessment, both at the time and with hindsight, is that Trump understood that cracking down on the rioters would be politically-advantageous to the rioters and their leadership. Deploying the national guard now appears to me to be a pre-emption against riots starting in Blue cities, preventing them from forking him in this way again.
I am not willing to accept them walking such a line. Blue Tribe was operating off an understanding of police violence generated by deliberate, coordinated lies by their own knowledge-production cadre. They believed those lies because the lies flattered their bigotries, and they acted on them to compromise rule of law on a very large scale and in immediately threatening ways to anyone who isn't one of them. They did this in a way that, as incidental side effects, killed many thousands of Americans and destroyed their ability to meaningfully cooperate on basic law enforcement for the indefinite future. The fact that they had sufficient intra-tribal message control at the time to make all this plausibly deniable within the tribe doesn't change the picture from across the tribal divide. Reds were not fooled, and coordinated their own common knowledge accordingly.
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