by At the 2016 Republican National Convention, after Trump won the nomination, David Clarke, the black sheriff of Milwaukee County, stood before the crowd, sporting a thin blue flag pin on his uniform, and decried “lawlessness.” . of the Black Lives Matter movement and the “collapse of social order.”
By the time Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign rolled around, the Black Lives Matter movement was resurgent in the wake of George Floyd’s death, given the new urgency of Trump’s presidency and a tougher lead from the dislocation caused by Covid. Trump’s campaign portrayed Democrats as enemies of law and order seeking to incubate unrest in American cities and chaos on the border.
At a rally in Waukesha, Wisconsin, the flag’s thin blue line took center stage, hanging over the crowd behind the lectern at which Trump spoke, in the position traditionally occupied by the American flag. In Macon, Georgia, he hung vertically behind the stage in a diptych of the Stars and Stripes. At a rally in Bullhead City, Arizona, he graced the stands flanking the podium, while a massive version, supported by a crane, waved above the crowd. From the stage, Trump stated that while the Democratic ticket was made up of “rioters and vandals,” he supported “the heroes of law enforcement.”
At the Republican National Convention, Vice President Mike Pence laid out the consequences of Trump losing the election in stark and personal terms: “The hard truth is that you will not be safe in Joe Biden’s America. “Under President Trump, we will always stand with those on the thin blue line.”
To defend Americans from what he said was a conspiracy to steal the election and destroy the country, Trump He suggested that their supporters (the police, the military, the bikers, the construction workers) would confront their enemies in the streets, rhetorically delegating to their allies as a law unto themselves: “They’re peaceful people, and antifa and all that ; “You better wait, they stay like this.”
