The president didn’t mean what it sounded like he meant regarding U.S. marshals’ shooting of Michael Reinoehl.
The president didn’t mean what it sounded like he meant regarding U.S. marshals’ shooting of Michael Reinoehl.
P resident Trump gave one of his rally speeches Thursday in North Carolina, which went on … and on … and on. I believe it was clocked at close to 90 minutes. The president obviously enjoys these performances, and his favorite parts are when he wings it, departing from the prepared teleprompter script.
If entertainment is the goal, Donald Trump can be really good at this. He was a celebrity long before he was a politician, and he has great comic timing and audience connection. He is, moreover, a provocateur, so he revels in the studiously unpresidential stories and R-rated insults. His core supporters eat it up. While I confess to finding it amusing occasionally (less as time has gone by), it’s become stale and, in light of the stakes, foolhardy. The president’s manner has always made a lot of Americans uncomfortable, because they rightly think the decorum and norms of the presidency are important to preserve. This goes at least some of the way toward explaining why he has never been as popular personally as some of his policies (particularly in the pre-COVID economy).
De gustibus, etc., etc.
What we all ought to be able to agree on, though, is that what the president of the United States says matters, even when he is clowning it up. The MAGA-camp quip that he should be taken seriously but not literally does acknowledge that he should be taken seriously — unless you’re telling me that I shouldn’t take that literally either.
In any event, the president can get himself in a heap of trouble when he goes off script. On Thursday, he did that. And with less than three weeks to go in a race where he is clearly behind, he can’t afford more blunders.
At one point in his speech, Trump seemed to address the killing by the U.S. marshals of a murder suspect, Michael Reinoehl, in Portland. It’s hard to be sure because the president went off script, his remarks were rambling, and he did not mention a name. He stated:
I said, “What happened?”
“Well, we haven’t arrested him.”
Two days, three days went by. We sent in the U.S. marshals. Took 15 minutes; it was over. Fifteen minutes, it was over. We got him.
The crowd applauded — some perhaps thinking he meant the marshals had arrested the man in question, but some perhaps knowing the man had been killed after he’d allegedly killed a man (Aaron Danielson) who has been described as a Trump supporter (which is why Reinoehl was being sought by the marshals’ fugitive task force).
The president continued (my italics): “They knew who he was. They didn’t want to arrest him. In 15 minutes that ended.”
Understandably, the president’s remarks have caused consternation among his opposition, and even some supporters — and, presumably, among some of whatever dwindling number of undecideds remain. I’ve highlighted the word “they” because it is the nub of the problem, which I think is a matter of inartful phrasing more than monstrousness — even conceding that, on my more benign interpretation, Trump’s manner is inappropriately cavalier under circumstances where a man was killed by law enforcement, even if it was a righteous shooting — a matter that is under investigation.
Those who always put the worst spin on everything Trump does interpret “they” to refer to the marshals. To be fair, this is not an unnatural reading.
Trump mentions the marshals going in to confront the suspect, says the confrontation was over in just 15 minutes, and then the next thing he asserts is that they knew who the suspect was and didn’t want to arrest him. After that, he reasserts that the whole thing ended in 15 minutes. Read literally, he appears to be saying that it was the federal marshals who did not want to arrest the man, so they quickly killed him instead — and, just as disturbing, the president seems to be celebrating that outcome.
In context, however, reviewing the video clip of Trump’s remarks, and after years of listening to his choppy speech and confusion of pronouns and antecedents, it is apparent to me that the they he was referring to were the local authorities in Portland, not the federal marshals.
The president starts out talking about how a murder suspect had not been arrested yet. It was the local authorities who should have made that arrest in the first instance. The president has made a constant theme of how local cops have had their hands tied by blue-state politicians, and he has singled out the mayors and other officials in riot-ravaged Portland and Seattle in this regard. Here, he says that after two or three days of waiting in frustration for the murder suspect to be arrested, his administration got exasperated and sent the federal marshals in to handle the situation.
The marshals moved right in and “got him.” I presume the president knows the suspect was killed, not arrested, but he doesn’t say that.
In any event, after his momentum was broken by applause, he continued with the story. But he had lost his place. When he resumed by saying, “They knew who he was. They didn’t want to arrest him,” I believe he was referring to the local Portland police and political leadership that had failed to act, causing his administration to send in the marshals. I don’t believe the president was referring to the marshals — as if to say that federal agents made a conscious decision to kill rather than arrest a murder suspect.
This was a bad thing to go off script about, and to chest-beat about. It was an especially bad thing to speak off the cuff and triumphally when a serious investigation is underway regarding the degree and timing of the use of lethal force. Indeed, claims have been made — such as in this New York Times report — that the marshals’ task force did not make a good-faith effort to take Michael Reinoehl into custody before four officers fired 37 rounds at him.
The president’s statements about the incident were gratuitous and wrongheaded. If you want to say, even if my benign interpretation is correct, that this is not how a president should speak, you’ll get no argument from me. But, contrary to his opposition’s with-Trump-always-assume-the-worst rendering, the president neither confessed to ordering an intentional homicide nor intended to suggest that federal agents had committed one.