As Images of Pain Flood TV, ‘Where Is Our Leader?’

After the tear fuel was deployed and the protesting Individuals muscled away from Lafayette Sq. simply in time for Monday’s night information, President Trump walked from the White Home Rose Backyard to St. John’s Church, took a Bible from his daughter’s luxurious purse and … simply held it.

Because the Rev. Al Sharpton would say later within the week: “I’ve been preaching since I used to be a bit boy. I’ve by no means seen anybody maintain the Bible like that.”

I’m unsure I’ve even seen anybody maintain a e-book like that. Mr. Trump glowered and hefted the Holy Writ as if he meant to swat a fly with it. With the eye of a pandemic-, unemployment- and unrest-plagued nation, he delivered the visible message, “That is what a Bible appears like.”

The surreal dissonance of the gesture was summed up when a reporter requested the president if the e-book was his Bible. “It’s a Bible,” he responded.

Simply so, this was not the cathartic second that the nation, torn open after the police killing of George Floyd, could have been searching for. However it was a second. And it was one which summed up how the veteran TV performer has and hasn’t been keen to carry out his job.

There was, particularly within the tv period, a eulogistic, ministerial facet of the presidency, the decision to present voice to the nation’s grief in darkish moments. Suppose Barack Obama singing “Amazing Grace” in Charleston or Ronald Reagan reciting poetry after the explosion of the house shuttle Challenger.

Mr. Trump has scratched that half out of the job description. His visible vocabulary, since his 1980s tabloid-feud days, has all the time been restricted to pantomimes of dominance. But the week started, for him, with a kryptonite picture of weak point: the White Home dormant and dark, amid stories that he had been hustled into a bunker.

That Monday morning, he lashed out throughout a convention name with a gaggle of governors, demanding they flood the streets, and thus the media, with exhibits of power. He wished the state executives to “dominate” the protesters, whom he known as “terrorists.”

If they’d not give him the present of power he wished, then the president — who in 1990 praised the Chinese government’s “strength” at Tiananmen Sq. — would reply this drawback like he had so many: by making a TV present. It was dominance theater, a Tianan-mini Sq. through which the sight of federal forces strong-arming peaceable demonstrators was as a lot part of the picture op because the Bible-brandishing.

And posing exterior the church was on model for a president who’s neither a lot of a churchgoer nor very conversant with what’s between the Bible’s covers, however who as soon as reminisced about watching Billy Graham “for hours and hours” on TV together with his father.

Rather than phrases of consolation, we acquired apocalyptic televangelism. The White Home Twitter account shortly slathered the footage in syrupy orchestration and packaged it right into a propaganda video.

However for as soon as, this was a political occasion greater than Mr. Trump and his theatrics. Distilled pictures of ache were everywhere: the video of George Floyd’s killing, the TV-news wallpaper of buildings burning and batons raining down, the eyewitness footage on Twitter and TikTok.

Video has been a weapon itself this week. For protesters, cameras have been a way of self-defense, for capturing scenes of brutality. On Thursday, video captured the second when police in Buffalo pushed down an elderly man and walked over him as he bled from his ear. (Police initially claimed that the person “tripped and fell.”)

For the authorities, it might be a cudgel, as when the White Home tweeted a video, later deleted, that dishonestly implied set of safety limitations exterior a Los Angeles synagogue was a cache of stones to be hurled by “Antifa and professional anarchists.”

For pictures of empathy and connection, you needed to look in every single place else. The nationwide accounting of America’s racial report reached even to late-night, the place Jimmy Fallon apologized for taking part in Chris Rock in blackface in a 2000 “Saturday Evening Stay” sketch.

“I spotted,” he mentioned, “that the silence is the most important crime that white guys like me and the remainder of us are doing.”

Mr. Fallon, whose present has all the time been militantly un-heavy, spent the week turning his quarantine-based “Tonight” into “a unique sort of present,” interviewing company just like the N.A.A.C.P. president Derrick Johnson and the rapper-activist Talib Kweli.

In fact, on TV, Very Particular Weeks have a manner of coming and going. One other rapper-activist, Killer Mike — whose anguished speech to Atlanta was possibly the sign video of per week of unrest — acquired at this when Stephen Colbert requested him what white Individuals may do proper now. A part of it, Killer Mike mentioned, was to “perceive that proper now could be all the time.”

Because the week went on, Mr. Trump’s dominance theater gave option to pictures of the White Home vanishing behind an enormous perimeter of fencing. By Friday, Mr. Trump was in entrance of cameras within the Rose Backyard once more, however solely to trumpet an unemployment report that he hoped Mr. Floyd was “wanting down” on in approval.

His challenger, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., rising from his quarantine campaign — his home-garden backdrop changed by a conventional line of flags — gave an tackle calling the presidency “an obligation to care.” Barack Obama, at a virtual town hall addressing problems with police violence, spoke on to younger black viewers: “I need you to know that you simply matter. I need you to know that your lives matter.”

In fact there are politics in all of this, implicit and express. Mr. Biden’s tackle, past any particular criticism or proposal, was asking viewers to think about another presidency that engaged with the language of caring.

However it wasn’t solely politicians who had been taking a look at America and seeing an empathy desert. That message got here, of all locations, from the Instagram feed of the wrestler-turned-Hollywood-star Dwayne Johnson, also referred to as the Rock.

In his video, Mr. Johnson is somber, but as pained and susceptible as a man-mountain in a muscles-bulging T-shirt may be. “The place is our chief?” he asks, in an prolonged, typically halting monologue that by no means mentions Mr. Trump by identify however addresses solely a conspicuous “You.”

“You’d be stunned,” he says, “how individuals in ache would reply if you say to them, ‘I care about you.’”

The caring would as a substitute should be outsourced. It got here from Meghan Markle, the African-American actress and Duchess of Sussex, in a video to the graduating class of her outdated highschool. The duchess, the article of racist sniping in Britain, spoke to the agony of her dwelling nation, reciting a listing of black victims of official violence: “George Floyd’s life mattered and Breonna Taylor’s life mattered and Philando Castile’s life mattered and Tamir Rice’s life mattered.”

The caring got here, most cathartically, from a Thursday memorial service for Mr. Floyd in Minneapolis, a sort of nationwide pastoral second that sharply contrasted with Monday’s violently stage-managed Campaign at Lafayette Park.

Members of the family recalled non-public moments; Mr. Floyd’s nephew, Brandon Williams, remembered how his uncle, a LeBron James fan, would have fun little triumphs by saying, “I really feel like I simply received a championship.” Mr. Sharpton constructed his personal eulogy on a fiery metaphor, instantiating centuries of African-American oppression in Mr. Floyd’s ultimate dying minutes.

“George Floyd’s story has been the story of black of us,” he mentioned. For 400 years, “you had your knee on our neck.”

However the broadest, strongest assertion out of the service was no assertion in any respect: Eight minutes and 46 seconds of silence, to match the time that Mr. Floyd had the breath of life crushed out of him.

For nearly 9 minutes amid per week of fury, TV went quiet. A lot of the main information networks (CNN reduce to commentators) and the published networks, in special-report mode, held the silence. The broadcasters reduce between the mourning of George Floyd’s household and reside, quiet footage of protesters in Minneapolis, within the capital, streaming over the Brooklyn Bridge.

It was solely a pause, not an finish. However it was one thing. Three days after the chilling theatrics in entrance of St. John’s, Individuals had lastly, collectively, if briefly, gone to church.