See also: It's an insurrection, no longer just protests

President Trump, who put in a stellar leadership performance with the coronavirus crisis — recognizing the danger, rendering aid with record speed, deregulating, leading on the cure, bringing in many players, and (unlike the blue-city and blue-state satraps) moving to close the operation as the curve flattened.  It was Trump's classic "hotel manager" crisis management at its best.

But something's gone wrong with his strange silence and ineffectual tweets with this crisis.  I'm not the only one who's noticed — the Daily Wire has an impressive wrap-up of this worrisome development here.

Its premise is quite twisted.  One racial incident in a solid blue city with all blue players, and suddenly Trump's the one being blamed.  It had to be unnerving for him and maybe easy to dismiss since it was all so meritless; it was blue-city awfulness at its worst.  The left hammered on.  The entire media establishment and Hollywood chi chi crowd stayed with this line and stepped up their encouragement of protests, painting him with the racism narrative.  He seems to be on the defensive.

Now the protests have became a vehicle for criminals, using color of race, for some kind of national "devil's nights."  It's the Detroitification of America, a neglected, miserable place, except going for multiple nights, with global markets and all the world watching.

This is not a good look for Trump.

Organized riots and disorder on a scale never seen in this country have plummeted the country into chaos.  The worst of it is in the big cities, where citizens are disarmed, cops are standing down with no support from local leaders, organized criminals and Antifa fanatics are doing the great looting and burning of their long held dream, and cell phone video is everywhere.  The monstrosity is being fueled in part by impunity, the belief that law and order are a thing of the past and one can commit these beatings and property crimes and get away with them with no consequences at all.  After all, blue-city and state governments had just let huge numbers of criminals let out of jail on the "logic" that they might catch COVID-19, so forget about paying for crimes.  Now all hell is breaking loose, with each hour revealing a new low.

It's horrifying to all of us. It's coming as the economy was just beginning to get back on its feet, and now suddenly no one's entirely sure if that's really going to happen.  Small and large business, all weakened by the coronavirus lockdowns, is suddenly wondering if private property is still operative.  More terrifying still, nothing is sacred.  Unlike past riots, rich areas are being specially targeted now — leftists on Twitter have for days been shouting their fantasy of looting Beverly Hills.  Affluent Santa Monica, led by leftist elected leaders, is a smoldering hellhole, with many beloved businesses, such as one Japanese teahouse, completely trashed and burned.  Say goodbye to quality of life, Santa Monica — all you have left now is high taxes, which are now going to go higher.  Historic churches have been targeted.  I don't even want to say the name of the church I'm worried about.  Beautiful, treasured national monuments — really big ones, such as the Lincoln Memorial and the World War II memorial, have been vandalized.  And now the White House itself is under physical attack by these leftist savages, with President Trump supposedly spirited off into some kind of safe room for occasions of foreign attack.  This is not a good look.  This does not evoke strong leadership.  It's not the Trump we know — and that's disturbing.

Is President Trump, after weathering attack after attack and crisis after crisis, now going to go down just by disgusting leftists?  If he does, it will leave these maggots triumphant and pretty well spell the end of America — its rule of law, its opportunity, its goodness.  America will become Nicaragua.

It's never been more urgent to stop this, and it calls for loud strong leadership, a speech, some kind of presence.  Trump needs to come out with fangs and claws — naming names, sending troops, defending the defenseless, and making it stop.  We need to know it's going to be OK. 

There was President Trump's vow to declare Antifa a terrorist organization, but we need more.  We need to see the order.  We need to see the declaration to the terrorists that they are hunted thugs now, that everything they ever try to do now subject to surveillance and Gitmo, with no left-wing lawyers to defend them a distinct possibility.  Share Froot Loops with Khalid Sheikh Muhammad.  We need to hear this speech — and see the same kind of speed and expedition we saw with the coronavirus — huge government resources employed to restore order and make private property a thing again.  People need to know that there are at least a few constants. They need to know that the property they have will be there tomorrow because the right to property, as Hernando de Soto noted, is the absolute basis for invisible architecture of capitalism and its critically imprortant rule of law. Without this, we're a Brazilian favela, ruled by thugs. Trump must terrorize the terrorizers who are attacking us now. Publicly arresting the worst of them, parading them for cameras, holding them up to scorn, and more important, these beasts' finances must be hunted down and used to make their victims whole — the trashed shopkeepers, the old people beaten in the streets. These leftists and their rich foundations financing this must become extremely sue-able.

Most of all, we need strength and reassurance, because right now the ship of state doesn't look too steady, it looks downright Venezuela-like, which might be sustainable the U.S. were a dictatatorship backed by the world's rogue states. But it's not. There's an election on and this challenge calls for humongous leadership. We need to see it. We can only hope it's coming.

We can't have a disappearing president at a time like this. We can't have Obama doing the tweets that get the coverage. We need Trump, and we need to know that help is on the way.  

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.