During the riots, Trump kept tweeting out "LAW AND ORDER!", like a crippled old man furious at the neighborhood kids for trashing his roses. He's angry, but doesn't have the means to do anything about it.
This made Trump look weak and impotent. All he did was hide in his bunker and shake his tiny fist on Twitter while chaos raged.
The rioters placed Trump in a dilemma action. Smart. If Trump does nothing, he looks weak. If he responds with sufficient force to quell the riots, he looks like a tyrant.
Off the top of my head, a better play would have been something like: "As President, I am bound by the Constitution to respect the sovereignty of each State. To any state Governor that requests assistance to restore peace, I will put all necessary Federal resources under your direct command."
Repeat variants of that, over and over. An offer of assistance demonstrating clear respect for the Constitution.
This very diplomatically throws the ball to mostly blue-state governors. Now they either have to be seen as doing nothing, or as collaborating with Trump. Moreover, if they do accept assistance and pull a Kent State, it's on their heads.
And I'm some clown on the internet. I imagine somebody that really does statecraft could do better.
Trump is a showman. Good at reality TV. Clearly didn't understand how to lead a country.
The whole thing failed cause Pence wouldn’t play ball, the Trump rabble started hunting for him (and Congresspeople on both sides) in the Capitol building, and there was no backup plan.
The statement about how Trump was “like a crippled old man furious at his neighborhood kids” is hilariously off the mark. He was furious that Pence didn’t back him up.
Maybe? I didn't get the sense that Trump had a game plan at all. Looked like pure reaction the entire time.
The optics from the outside were "angry old man clutching his cane, shouting at the neighborhood troublemakers".
It would seem that they actively select for it.
> It would seem like it would be better for business to just not let people join the organization if they're relatively likely to one day go on a moral crusade.
To be fair: Blue Team straight up hit the panic button when Trump was elected in 2016.
From a non-US perspective, Trump was... grating? Talked a big game, but clearly didn't have the leadership chops. His "Law and Order" tweets during all the rioting were absolutely pathetic. Blue Team, however, has clearly gone quite insane.
At this point, I'm sort of politically homeless, which puts me in good company. Republicans talk hard about winding the clock back but don't actually seem to do much of anything, Libertarians pretend there is no clock, and Democrats evangelize that we'll finally escape the oppression of time itself once we've burned the clock to cinders.
What a time to be alive.