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“The president seems to think that dominating

black people, dominating peaceful protesters, is

law and order,” CNN’s Anderson Cooper said. “It’s

not. He calls them thugs. Who’s the thug here?”

At the same time on Fox News Channel,

Tucker Carlson said that Trump provided

“a powerful symbolic gesture, a declaration

that this country, our national symbols, our

oldest institutions, will not be desecrated and

defeated by nihilistic destruction.”

For the most part, the television commentators

talked past each other to vastly different

audiences. CNN and MSNBC concentrated on

peaceful protests in the wake of George Floyd’s

death at the hands of police; the Fox News

focus was on violence and property destruction

in the streets.

The same arguments have animated American

politics for decades, but cable news uses

megaphones to amplify them.

Trump has the full authority to use the federal

government to go into states to restore order,

Fox’s Sean Hannity said.

“If the liberal mayors or governors in most cases

are unwilling and unable to protect their own

citizens, the federal government will,” he said.

Not so fast, Rachel Maddow said on MSNBC.

“While there are depths that even the most

doomsday predictions about the Trump

presidency did not plumb, this rubicon moment

arrived tonight in the haphazard and slipshod

way that has become familiar for most of the

other previously unimaginable dark turns this

country has taken since Mr. Trump has become

president,” she said.

Image: Nati Harnik
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