A Daily Reid: On Memory

Memorial Day is a day of remembrance. America is in the process of forced forgetting.

Minneapolis, USA. 20th Aug, 2020. The George Floyd Mural in Minneapolis was defaced on August 18, 2020, with black spray paint covering his eyes. Two days later, the paint was still visible. Credit: Alex Kormann/Minneapolis Star Tribune/TNS/Alamy Live News

If he was alive today, George Floyd would be 51 years old. He’d likely be spending time with his daughter, or hanging out with his girlfriend. Maybe he’d have gotten back to driving trucks after the pandemic shut down that avenue of his income. Perhaps he’d still be performing with his hip hop group, Screwed Up Click. Or maybe just hanging out this Memorial Day long weekend with family and friends, barbecuing.

None of that is happening, though, because George Floyd is dead. He was killed on May 25, 2020 by a police officer named Derrick Chauvin, who forced the big man onto the ground and knelt on his neck for nine and a half excruciating minutes after arresting him on allegations he may have tried to buy a pack of cigarettes at a Minneapolis convenience store with a counterfeit $20 bill. Chauvin killed George Floyd in broad daylight, with a street full of people watching, and at least one — a teenaged girl — recording him, while he looked deadpan into the camera. Three other Minneapolis police officers watched him do it, with two of them even helping to hold George Floyd down on the pavement, locked in handcuffs, while the fourth kept the gathering crowd from intervening to help keep George Floyd alive.

Frame from witness video, showing Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd's neck

For his actions, Chauvin became the rare police officer convicted of murdering a Black person in America. He was convicted in state and federal court, and is serving a 22 year sentence as I write this post. His appeals have been for naught. Justice for George Floyd’s little girl and his family came in the form of a record cash settlement obtained by Ben Crump, the lawyer nicknamed the Attorney General of Black America. He is who you call when police kill your loved one. It’s a grim business. And it never seems to run dry. This is America, and George Floyd has become a mural that summarizes who and what we are. We put dead Black people on walls, but we can’t stop them getting killed for almost no reason at all.

News outlets the world over are running stories this weekend about how Americans are remembering George Floyd on the anniversary of his death. The killing caused protests to metastasize around the country, even as we were locking down due to COVID. Donald Trump and the right resent those protests to this day — including the fires often set by people on their own ideological side, in order to discredit the Black Lives Matter movement and spark racial strife, and the estimated billion dollars in damage. It worked. Trump’s pandemic failures helped elect Joe Biden in 2020 — just months after George Floyd was murdered. And the switch in the Justice Department is why Chauvin was charged federally at all. But the racial strife over the murder and the conviction never receded, helping to set the stage for the January 6 insurrection the following January, which put Trump back in office in 2025. Chauvin became a right wing cause celebre, with MAGA influencers calling on Trump to pardon him for his federal crimes.

Even if he doesn’t do that (and it wouldn’t spring Chauvin from his 22 year state sentence anyway) … Trump is doing MAGA business in more important ways. He rapidly dismantling any notion of Black Lives Matter, not just the 21st century movement — but also the fight for Black humanity going back to 1619. Trump came back into office with a racial vengeance. His regime is setting fire to our national memory. His administration is rifling through the federal records — anything archived online — and deleting anything and everything Black.

In terms of policy, his Injustice Department, led by a woman who spends more time doing hits on Fox than apparently on reading the laws or the Constitution, has ripped up every consent decree against every violent police department in America, including the one in Minneapolis whose officers murdered George Floyd. They have ended civil rights enforcement and substituted for it an idea succinctly summarized in The New York Times:

For Trump, Civil Rights Protections Should Help White Men

All they left out is the word “only.” From the article:

“The plain message that they are conveying is: If you even think about, talk about or claim to be in favor of diversity, of equity, of inclusion, of accessibility, you will be targeted,” said Maya Wiley, the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

“They’re conveying that white men are the most discriminated against people in American society,” she added, “and therefore entitled to affirmative action.”

A Memorial Day without the memory

When it comes to the military, the regime has aggressively sought to erase the memory of Black war heroes. Even famous ones must disappear. Medgar Evers must go. Jackie Robinson must go. The Tuskegee Airmen? Go! Women, gay troops, and certainly trans troops: vamoose! Disappear! They even tried to erase the Enola Gay — apparently just based on the name. All that must remain in the national memory are straight white men.

Happy Memorial Day.

Mister Trump goes to West Point

Donald Trump gave this year’s commencement address at West Point. And he treated the graduating troops to an allegorical message about … checks notes … chasing gay and trans people out of service, banning the use of pronouns (no word on how the troops will form full sentences without them…) and … trophy wives. Seriously.

Trump would know about Trophy wives. As USA Today points out:

Trump has been married three times: Ivana Zelníčková – married in 1977, divorced in 1990; Marla Maples – married in 1993, divorced in 1999; and Melania Knauss, now First Lady Melania Trump – married in 2005. Each worked as professional models before their engagement to Trump.

Trophy wives, man … trophy wives …

So this Memorial Day, the Disunited States of America will commemorate our dead, with the military led by a draft dodging commander in chief who routinely disrespected the U.S. military and particularly disabled servicemen, even before he wore a MAGA hat to the West Point commencement and slurred on about “trophy wives.” This is the guy who speculated about renaming Veterans Day as “Victory Day for World War I” and May 8th, the day when we commemorate defeating the Nazis in Europe as “Victory In World War II Day” — both sounding eerily similar to the Victory Day celebrations in Russia. Fun fact: victory in the second world war didn’t actually occur on May 8, 1945, since the U.S. wouldn’t obliterate Nagasaki and Hiroshima with nuclear bombs until months later.

This same convenient bone spurs sufferer (though it doesn’t seem to deter him from standing and walking for hours on a golf course) … who reportedly views wearing the uniform as a loser and sucker move … is preparing to throw himself a $45 million military parade in honor of his birthday next month … sorry … Flag Day … while getting the latest military fighter jets labeled F-47s in his honor, snagging a sweet used luxury plane from Qatar to supposedly use as Air Force One, and doing all of that while cutting veterans’ benefits and letting doge sack people from the V.A. On the upside, he and his superfan Greta Van Susteren are apparently bullying elite DC law firms to provide MAGA veterans with free legal services. (She’s a lawyer. Why doesn’t she provide that free legal help herself?”

Meanwhile, regarding that June 14 boondoggle of a parade…

A source with direct knowledge of the goings on tells me the plans are going swimmingly, with federal employees having to dig into museum inventory to dredge up mothballed tanks and other military hardware to roll out for Trump’s toy soldiers march. Some of the items being looked at to fill Trump’s street armada are so old they can’t actually be driven. And my source tells me the other question is how to get even working tanks from neighboring states into downtown D.C. without obliterating the roads. Maybe he could repurpose these old war horses from 1940s Kentucky and fly them in on Qatar Air…

June 1942 - M3 tanks in action, Fort Knox, Kentucky. Alamy photos.

And while the MAGA zombie crowd will likely enjoy the parade, even as many of them lose their Medicaid, and many Americans will blandly enjoy it on CSPAN or ignore it altogether; the irony of the lavish spending while doge is draining federal agencies and gutting benefits for seniors, cancer patients and little kids, won’t be lost on anyone who still retains their soul and hasn’t yet died from the apparently re-invigorated RFK Jr. measles.

The art of the steal

Trump finally threw his $Trump meme coin party this weekend; treating his anonymous richy rich guests to an apparently shitty, Spirit Airlines level meal and a chance to shake their asses next to the presidential seal — despite his spokesbunny having insisted the event was purely private and unrelated to the Office.

Social media had a ball with the Strumpet banquet scam…

The New York Times, meanwhile, has laid out just how much our pudgy national Strumpet is raking in…

When Hillary Clinton was first lady, a furor erupted over reports that she had once made $100,000 from a $1,000 investment in cattle futures. Even though it had happened a dozen years before her husband became president, it became a scandal that lasted weeks and forced the White House to initiate a review.

Thirty-one years later, after dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Jeff Bezos agreed to finance a promotional film about Melania Trump that will reportedly put $28 million directly in her pocket — 280 times the Clinton lucre and in this case from a person with a vested interest in policies set by her husband’s government. Scandal? Furor? Washington moved on while barely taking notice.

The Trumps are hardly the first presidential family to profit from their time in power, but they have done more to monetize the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House. The scale and the scope of the presidential mercantilism has been breathtaking. The Trump family and its business partners have collected $320 million in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas real estate deals worth billions of dollars and are opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch charging $500,000 apiece to join, all in the past few months alone.

Just last week, Qatar handed over a luxury jet meant for Mr. Trump’s use not just in his official capacity but also for his presidential library after he leaves office. Experts have valued the plane, formally donated to the Air Force, at $200 million, more than all of the foreign gifts bestowed on all previous American presidents combined.

And Mr. Trump hosted an exclusive dinner at his Virginia club for 220 investors in the $TRUMP cryptocurrency that he started days before taking office in January. Access was openly sold based on how much money they chipped in — not to a campaign account but to a business that benefits Mr. Trump personally.

And Peter Baker lays out just how unusual the Trump family’s personal grifting is — from “Smelania” (AKA $Melania) to the brazen grifting of the Trump sons.

By conventional Washington standards, according to students of official graft, the still-young Trump administration is a candidate for the most brazen use of government office in American history, perhaps eclipsing even Teapot Dome, Watergate and other famous scandals.

“I’ve been watching and writing about corruption for 50 years, and my head is still spinning,” said Michael Johnston, a professor emeritus at Colgate University and author of multiple books on corruption in the United States.

Yet a mark of how much Mr. Trump has transformed Washington since his return to power is the normalization of moneymaking schemes that once would have generated endless political blowback, televised hearings, official investigations and damage control. The death of outrage in the Trump era, or at least the dearth of outrage, exemplifies how far the president has moved the lines of accepted behavior in Washington.

Mr. Trump, the first convicted felon elected president, has erased ethical boundaries and dismantled the instruments of accountability that constrained his predecessors. There will be no official investigations because Mr. Trump has made sure of it. He has fired government inspectors general and ethics watchdogs, installed partisan loyalists to run the Justice Department, F.B.I. and regulatory agencies and dominated a Republican-controlled Congress unwilling to hold hearings. …

… “The president is abiding by all conflict of interest laws that are applicable to the president,” said Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary. “The American public believes it is absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency. This president was incredibly successful before giving it all up to serve our country publicly.”

But saying that he is abiding by all conflict of interest laws that are applicable to the president is meaningless since, as Mr. Trump himself has long noted, conflict of interest laws are not applicable to the president.

Moreover, he has not given it all up; in fact, he is still making money from his private business interests run by his sons, and independent estimates indicate that he has hardly sacrificed financially by entering politics. Forbes estimated Mr. Trump’s net worth at $5.1 billion in March, a full $1.2 billion higher than the year before and the highest it has ever been in the magazine’s rankings.

The president’s sons scoff at the idea that they should limit their business activities, which directly benefit their father. Donald Trump Jr. has said that the family restrained itself during his father’s first term only to be criticized anyway, so it made no sense to hold back anymore. “They’re going to hit you no matter what,” he said last week at a business forum in Qatar. “So we’re just going to play the game.”

And it’s not just the grifting: it’s the brazen corruption…

Congressional Republicans spent years investigating Hunter Biden, the son of President Joseph R. Biden Jr., for trading on his family name to make millions of dollars, even labeling the clan the “Biden Crime Family.” But while Hunter Biden’s cash flow was a tiny fraction of that of Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump and Jared Kushner, Republicans have shown no appetite for looking into the current presidential family’s finances.

“The American public has had to inure itself to the corruption of Donald Trump and his presidency because the president and his Republican Party have given the American public no choice in the matter,” said J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former appeals court judge who has become a critic of Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump evinces no concern that people funneling money into his family coffers have interests in government policies. Some of the crypto investors who attended his dinner on Thursday night acknowledged that they were using the opportunity to press him on regulation of the industry. According to a video obtained by The Times, he reciprocated by promising guests that he would not be as hard on them as the Biden administration was.

One guest at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., that night was Justin Sun, a Chinese billionaire who became one of the largest holders of the $TRUMP memecoin after buying more than $40 million, earning him a spot in an even more exclusive private VIP reception with the president before the dinner. The Securities and Exchange Commission in 2023 accused Mr. Sun of fraud, but after Mr. Trump took over the agency put its lawsuit on hold even as it dropped other crypto investigations.

As for Mr. Bezos and Qatar, each has reason to get on Mr. Trump’s good side. In his first term, Mr. Trump, peeved at coverage in The Washington Post, which is owned by Mr. Bezos, repeatedly pushed aides to punish his main firm, Amazon, by drastically increasing its U.S. Postal Service shipping rates and denying it a multibillion-dollar Pentagon contract. Mr. Trump denounced Qatar as a “funder of terrorism” and isolated it diplomatically. He has not targeted either Mr. Bezos or Qatar in his second term.

May the Gods and the people remember.