Anonymous ID: 4cadeb Dec. 29, 2024, 12:33 a.m. No.22248763   🗄️.is 🔗kun

Just watch them: Seeing a glint of Pierre Trudeau in Donald Trump

 

Canadians would be forgiven if they watched the U.S. President speak this month and felt a sense of déjà vu.

 

In early June, a protest group took over parts of east-end Seattle, pronouncing it a police-free area, and declaring what they called a “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.” Both the Governor of Washington State and the mayor of Seattle urged calm.

 

So in an interview with Fox News’s Harris Faulkner, President Donald Trump said that his administration is “not going to let Seattle be occupied by anarchists.”

 

“If there were more toughness, you wouldn’t have the kind of devastation that you had in Minneapolis and in Seattle. I mean, let’s see what’s going on in Seattle,” Mr. Trump told Ms. Faulkner. “I will tell you, if they don’t straighten that situation out, we’re going to straighten it out.”

 

In short: Just watch me.

 

That famous vow of course, came from Pierre Trudeau, who in the October Crisis in 1970 invoked the War Measures Act, deployed military forces in Quebec after the kidnapping of a Quebec political leader and a British diplomat, and suggested in a press scrum that he might take even more drastic steps to battle the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ).

 

And that vow’s spirit found another echo in an entirely different context, 50 years later, from the mouth of the U.S. President, after peaceful protests over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis spurred street skirmishes with police and squalls of store break-ins, as well as furious debate across the United States about the sanctity of dissent in civic life, the role of the military in domestic life, and the President’s judgment, temperament and commitment to democratic values.

 

Read more… https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-just-watch-them-seeing-a-glint-of-pierre-trudeau-in-donald-trump/